Tangentially related - HEVC for images [LWN.net]

Tangentially related - HEVC for images

Posted Jun 5, 2025 10:24 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
Parent article: OpenH264 induces headaches for Fedora

Just cause I happened to notice this yesterday in some other stuff: There is an image compression format, HEVC, that significantly improves on JPEG - e.g. images can be 50% the size, even 40% or less, of the JPEG, for the same quality. Yet it appears no major browsers support it, despite it having been around for 10+ years now. And... it comes down to patents.

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Tangentially related - HEVC for images

Posted Jun 5, 2025 12:11 UTC (Thu) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

"significantly improves on JPEG" is a pretty low bar, given how old JPEG is. It's already improved on by WebP (almost universally available in browsers), AVIF (based on AV1; very widely available), and JPEG XL (proposed but rejected for technical reasons and lack of interest). You can even get a reported 35% improvement on traditional JPEG just by using a modern JPEG encoder like Jpegli. AVIF is probably slightly better compression than HEIC, without the big patent problems, so there's no longer any need for HEIC.