So this week libwebp2 appeared in a public repository. From a quick glance it looks like lossy format is based on AV1 coding blocks and lossless format is largely the same as the original WebP lossless but both now use ANS coding. And (of course) there’s a hint on experimental lossy encoding using neural networks.
Let’s pretend that JPEG has finally died (again) and GIF and PNG are both gone. So what modern image formats intended for general audience are out there?
Of course there’s Nokia HEIF which is picture(s) split into tiles, coded with H.EVC and stored in MP4. Because of the wonderful patent situation around it probably it won’t be used outside iEcosystem.
AVIF—same container, different codec (AV1 in this case).
WebP/WebP2—Baidu image format with lossy compression based on Baidu VPx codec (VP8 or VP10) and lossless compression from the French division of Baidu.
JPEG XL—a joint project between Cloudinary and Swiss division of Baidu responsible for Baidu Chrömli (in case you did not know that’s a Swiss word for various small sweets bits like Guetsli, Brunsli and such; Brötli/Gipfeli/Zöpfli/Grittibänzli are related to bread though, especially Brötli). Anyway, that’s a different format with different set of features that include lossless JPEG recompression (and hopefully the best practical lossless image compression as one would expect from creators of FLIF).
So my point is if you’d have to choose between all those formats essentially you have to pick some format from Baidu (either directly from it or using its codec). Somehow this future does not excite me much so I’d rather stick to old formats for which a single programmer can write a standalone decoder in reasonable time.
Also for some reason this reminds me of Soviet space program where there were three main construction centres (led by Korolyov, Chelomey and Yangel) producing different missiles and spaceships many of those are still in use. But the competition was also hurtful for the general progress. As you remember there were three heavy spaceships proposed by neither of them was really successful: Korolyov’s N1 had failures because of the engines, Yangel’s R-56 was cancelled early in favour of N1, Chelomey’s UR-700 has never been realized either, Glushko’s Energia had two launches (both successful) but it was too late and there was no payload for it beside equally successful Buran program. So on one hand you have variety and on the other hand you have a lot of wasted resources and efforts.
I see parallels here and with AV1 as well. Why the company controlling libaom would develop libgav1 too?
And while speaking about AV1 I should mention that it reminds me of another kind of project, namely Olympic games.
Originally the Olympics were competition between various people from various city-states for both religious and entertainment reasons. Later they were resurrected as a mean to promote sports and unity, but just a couple decades later the games became more of a political instrument promoting national teams instead of being just a competition of individuals from various places (partly because all the training becomes too costly for a non-professional sportsman, partly because countries want the prestige). And a bit later it became a business project that 2004 Summer games in Athens demonstrated the best.
So you have a committee that holds the rights to the symbols, logos, mascots and everything else. The receiving party has to build large infrastructure to host various competitions and hope that the guests will bring enough money to compensate at least some of those costs (and maybe those buildings would be useful later but quite often they are not). Various companies pay a lot of money to become sponsors in hope that such status will work as effective advertisement, broadcasting companies pay a lot of money for broadcasting rights in hope of getting more viewers (and money from ads). So before the games a lot of parties pay a lot of money and afterwards they might make profit or not. And the host country is left with huge expenses for constructing stadiums and such—and those rather useless constructions that are too big for regular events or training. And of course the prestige. Where money go to and which Olympics were profitable to the host country is left as an exercise to the reader.
In a similar way AV1 feels like such project: it drew resources from different companies and people from different opensource multimedia projects to build something huge that is not really useful (I know that in theory it should trade bandwidth for CPU heat but how many customers will be AV1 ready before AV2 is released and the cycle repeats?) and people involved in libaom, svt-av1, dav1d and rav1e would better be doing something else including better multimedia frameworks (I work on NihAV mostly because the alternatives are even worse) or new codecs or even on a decent video editor so people making videos for BaidUTube won’t have to rely on expensive proprietary solutions that tend to crash anyway or suspicious Chinese or Russian programs that rip off opensource libraries (I’ve seen one using mencoder compiled as a .dll).
Anyway, like the Olympics were intended to promote sport and healthy living but became business projects that are financial loss to the most parties, AV1 looks like a project that also while being positioned as the saviour of opensource multimedia essentially benefits just a small group of organisations. And as with many other things I say I’d be happy to be proven wrong.
P.S. In case you say that I’m inconsistent and dislike both competing groups inside one company and uniting efforts (for the sake of the same company). Well, I’d prefer different entities (companies or opensource projects or whatever) to produce single solution each while there’s more than just one entity doing it. To return to space analogies, I’d rather see many private companies developing an own line of spaceships each (for various purposes too) instead of ULA producing several kinds of radically different spaceships without any outside competition.