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from the just-use-a-photocopier-multiple-times dept.
Google has developed and open-sourced a new JPEG algorithm that reduces file size by about 35 percent—or alternatively, image quality can be significantly improved while keeping file size constant. Importantly, and unlike some of its other efforts in image compression (WebP, WebM), Google's new JPEGs are completely compatible with existing browsers, devices, photo editing apps, and the JPEG standard.
The new JPEG encoder is called Guetzli, which is Swiss German for cookie (the project was led by Google Research's Zurich office). Don't pay too much attention to the name: after extensive analysis, I can't find anything in the Github repository related to cookies or indeed any other baked good.
There are numerous ways of tweaking JPEG image quality and file size, but Guetzli focuses on the quantization stage of compression. Put simply, quantization is a process that tries to reduce a large amount of disordered data, which is hard to compress, into ordered data, which is very easy to compress. In JPEG encoding, this process usually reduces gentle colour gradients to single blocks of colour and often obliterates small details entirely.
The difficult bit is finding a balance between removing detail, and keeping file size down. Every lossy encoder (libjpeg, x264, lame) does it differently.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @10:49PM (2 children)
Yeah, we should never even have built the internet, it just gets used by advertisters.
::rolleyes::
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @11:05PM
You jest, but your statement is not necessarily invalid...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday March 19 2017, @11:11PM
This is one unfortunate, and perhaps unforeseen, consequence of the internet infrastructure itself being as close to "agnostic, dumb pipe with as little overhead as possible." I'm not sure it's the worst possibility though, and it may even be the best possible one, something like that old saw about democracy being the worst form of government except all the others. The idea is to build value at the last mile, not on the pipe itself (though of course our corporate overlords somehow managed to fuck that one up too...).
Sometimes it feels like we geeks are a little like the da Vinci stand-in Vetinari keeps captive in the Discworld books, the kind of people who bring about entirely new ways of doing things yet could never imagine what kind of horrors the greedy, evil, and venal among us would wreak with them.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...