libavif VS jxl.js

It's 2023, surely this is not yet another bug related to memory unsafety that could be avoided if we'd stop writing critical code that deals with extremely complex untrusted input (media codecs) in memory unsafe languages?

Yep, of course it is: https://github.com/webmproject/libwebp/commit/902bc919033134...

I guess libwebp could be excused as it was started when there were no alternatives, but even for new projects today we're still committing the same mistake[1][2][3].

[1] -- https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d

[2] -- https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif

[3] -- https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libiamf

Yep. Keep writing these in C; surely nothing will go wrong.

As far as I understand you are talking about this plugin. I don't know c++ and half of the code was like a black magic, but if I get it correctly, it encodes your images with libavif, and adds custom metadata ([solar/time of day] -> json -> base64).

So a few dozen comments, but so far it doesn't look like any mention the immediate thing that jumped out at me which was the claims vs AVIF:

>"In turn, what users will be given is yet another facet of the web that Google itself controls: the AVIF format."

Huh? I'll admit I haven't been following codecs as super ultra closely as I used to, but I thought AOM was a pretty broad coalition of varying interests and AV1 an open, royalty free codec that was plenty open source friendly? I've heard plenty of reasonable arguments that JPEG XL has some real technical advantages over AVIF and as well as superior performance is much more feature rich and scalable. So I could see people being bummed for that. But this is the first time I've heard the assertion that it's somehow a Google project? I mean, AOM's libavif reference is BSD too [0]? I'd love some more details on that from anyone who has been following this more closely. I can even understand if AOM isn't as community friendly and an accusation that it's dominated by big corps, but in that case why single out Google alone? From wiki:

>The governing members of the Alliance for Open Media are Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, Samsung Electronics and Tencent.

Like, Google is certainly significant, but that's a lot of equally heavy hitters. And interesting that Mozilla is there too.

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0: https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif

> You have a good point that AVIF layered image items can act like such P/B-frames. Do libavif (or other AVIF implementations if any) make use of them?

Seemingly. As search for "libavif progressive encoding" shows several issues about this, and a search for "progressive" in https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif/blob/main/include/av... shows an enum for avifProgressiveState, appears to show support for it.

I mean, it already has it: https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif/commit/570c42c2c10a878c8cc896f1c5daf1a955274142

Apart from mpv and ffplay, the only software I currently have installed that can play animated AVIF is Chromium. And from what I've read from this libavif bug report, I'm not sure if looping animated files in general is something that's just done by default by a lot of software regardless of whether the file is marked as a loop or not.

The support for progressive AVIF decoding has landed in libavif and in Chromium. But are there any docs on how to create and test progressive AVIF images?

The "for example" is the key here, because AVIF does support multi-layer coding per the spec now (though not currently implemented in libavif from what I can tell).

libavif is at version 0.11.1, see https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif/tags

> It's so frustrating how the chromium team is ending up as a gatekeeper of the Internet by pick and choosing what gets developed or not.

https://github.com/niutech/jxl.js is based on Chromium tech (Squoosh from GoogleChromeLabs) and provides an opportunity to use JXL with no practical way for Chromium folks to intervene.

Even if that's a suboptimal solution, JXL's benefits supposedly should outweight the cost of integrating that, and yet I haven't seen actual JXL users running to that in droves.

So JXL might not be a good support for your theory: where people could do they still don't. Maybe the format isn't actually that important, it's just a popular meme to rehash.

https://github.com/niutech/jxl.js a javascript polyfill taken from the main page https://jpegxl.info/

There are other decoders [0] written in a "safe language" (rust) listed as well. So no there are many "safe" implementations

[0] https://github.com/tirr-c/jxl-oxide

> If you care about JXL, and only want to support JXL, and you put a JXL in your picture tag, then the browser still won't render it, even if you use a picture tag.

Is this true if you provide a polyfill? Have you tried it and it failed? (Serious question.)

https://github.com/niutech/jxl.js

All of the people here who are so passionate about JPEG-XL will be happy to learn that there's nothing preventing them from using it on their sites right now:

https://github.com/niutech/jxl.js

If you want Chrome to ship with JPEG-XL support, use it. At some point, browser makers will decide it's worth the cost to them and all users to add it.

> Please be aware that some images may not load on this page unless your browser supports JPEG-XL

The site could provide a WebAssembly decoder to make the JPEG-XL images work for everyone.

For example, here's a WebAssembly decoder: https://github.com/niutech/jxl.js

Demo: https://niutech.github.io/jxl.js/

at this point, I'd consider just using a polyfill library to decode jpegxl data client-side, like JXL https://github.com/niutech/jxl.js

:) There are some wasm vs native benchmarks in the context of JPEG XL (for example https://github.com/niutech/jxl.js#benchmark)

For adding JPEG XL support I went with jxl.js which I modified for my use case. After looking through the main file, which is also called jxl.js, I decided I only needed 2 relevant code blocks. The one to decode the image and the one to turn the ImageData into something I could display in my existing codebase (which I already partially had implemented for another use case).

It's easy - you'll get ReferenceError: SharedArrayBuffer is not defined when the COOP and COEP headers are not set. Multithreading is enabled by default if you use the scripts from multithread folder. If only SIMD is supported, it is being used. Oh, and progressive decoding is also enabled by default.