Comment by jillesvangurp
3 years ago
They didn't "lose interest", their lawyers pulled the emergency brakes. Blame patent holders, not Google. Like Microsoft: https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/17/microsoft_ans_patent/. Microsoft could probably be convinced to be reasonable. But there may be a few others. Google actually also holds some patents over this but they've done the right thing and license those patents along with their implementation.
To fix this, you'd need to convince Google, and other large companies that would be exposed to law suits related to these patents (Apple, Adobe, etc.), that these patent holders are not going to insist on being compensated.
Other formats are less risky; especially the older ones. Jpeg is fine because it's been out there for so long that any patents applicable to it have long expired. Same with GIF, which once was held up by patents. Png is at this point also fine. If any patents applied at all they will soon have expired as the PNG standard dates back to 1997 and work on it depended on research from the seventies and eighties.
There are no royalties to be paid on JPEG XL. Nobody but Cloudinary and Google is claiming to hold relevant patents, and Cloudinary and Google have provided a royalty free license. Of course the way the patent system works, anything less than 20 years old is theoretically risky. But so far, there is nobody claiming royalties need to be paid on JPEG XL, so it is similar to WebP in that regard.
"Patent issues" has become a (sometimes truthful) excuse for not doing something.
When the big boys want to do something, they find a way to get it done, patents or no, especially if there's only "fear of patents" - see Apple and the whole watch fiasco.
Patents was not the latest excuse I heard from Google. Their explanation was security concerns.
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> [...] other large companies that would be exposed to law suits related to these patents (Apple, Adobe, etc.) [...]
Adobe included JPEG XL support to their products and also the DNG specification. So that argument is pretty much dead, no?
Adobe also has an order of magnitude lower number of installed software than Chrome or Firefox which makes patent fees much cheaper. And their software is actually paid for by users.
DNG Converter (which includes JPEG XL compression) isn’t paid. You can get it here: https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/using/adobe-dng-converter...
Not that simple. Maybe they struck a deal with a few of the companies or they made a different risk calculation. And of course they have a pretty fierce patent portfolio themselves so there's the notion of them being able to retaliate in kind to some of these companies.
I don't think that's true (see my other comment for what the patent is really about), but even when it is, Adobe's adoption means that JPEG XL is worth the supposed "risk". And Google does ship a lot of technologies that are clearly patent-encumbered. If the patent is the main concern, they could have answered so because there are enough people wondering about the patent status, but the Chrome team's main reason against JPEG XL was quite different.
Adobe sells paid products and can carve out a license fee for that, like they do with all the other codecs and libraries they bundle. That's part of the price you are paying.
Harder to do for users of Chrome.
The same thing can be said with many patent-encumbered video codecs which Chrome does support nevertheless. That alone can't be a major deciding factor, especially given that the rate of JPEG XL adoption has been remarkably faster than any recent media format.
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You can get Adobe DNG Converter for free and use it to convert your raw files to DNG compressed with JPEG XL.
https://helpx.adobe.com/content/dam/help/en/camera-raw/digit...
The Microsoft patent doesn't apply to JXL, and in any case, Microsoft has literally already affirmed that they will not use it to go after any open codec.
How exactly is that done? I assume even an offhand comment by an official (like CEO, etc) that is not immediately walked back would at least protect people from damages associated with willful infringement.
That ANS patent supposedly relates to refining the coding tables based on symbols being decided.
It is slower for decoding and Jpeg xl does not do that for decoding speed reasons.
The specification doesn't allow it. All coding tables need to be in final form.
> their lawyers pulled the emergency brakes
Do you have source for that claim?
Probably this: https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/17/microsoft_ans_patent/
I think it would be much better for everyone involved and humanity if Mr. Duda himself got the patent in the first place instead of praying no one else will.
Duda published his ideas, that’s supposed to be it.
Prior art makes patents invalid anyway.
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I'm just inferring from the fact that MS got a patent and then this whole thing ground to a halt.
Not only you have no source backing your claim, but there is a glaring counterexample. Chromium's experimental JPEG XL support carried an expiry milestone, which was delayed multiple times and it was bumped last time on June 2022 [1] before the final removal on October, which was months later the patent was granted!
[1] https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40168998#comment52
In other words, there's no source.
>To fix this, you'd need to convince Google, and other large companies that would be exposed to law suits related to these patents (Apple, Adobe, etc.), that these patent holders are not going to insist on being compensated.
Apple has implemented JPEG XL support in macOS and iOS. Adobe has also implemented support for JPEG XL in their products.
Also, if patents were the reason Google removed JXL from Chrome, why would they make up technical reasons for doing so?
Please don't present unsourced conspiracy theories as if they were confirmed facts.
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Mate, you're literally pulling something from your ass. Chrome engineers claim that they don't want JXL because it isn't good enough. Literally no one involved has said that it has anything to do with patents.
>There must be a more rational reason than that. I've not heard anything better than legal reasons. But do correct me if I'm wrong. I've worked in big companies, and patents can be a show stopper. Seems like a plausible theory (i.e. not a conspiracy theory)
In your first comment, you stated as a fact that "lawyers pulled the emergency brakes". Despite literally no one from Google ever saying this, and Google giving very different reasons for the removal.
And now you act as if something you made up in your mind is the default theory and the burden of proof is on the people disagreeing with you.
People who look after Chrome’s media decoding are an awkward bunch, they point blank refuse to support <img src=*.mp4 for example
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If you want a simple conspiracy theory, how about this:
The person responsible for AVIF works on Chrome, and is responsible for choosing which codecs Chrome ships with. He obviously prefers his AVIF to a different team's JPEG-XL.
It's a case of simple selfish bias.
Why not take Chrome's word for it:
---cut---
Helping the web to evolve is challenging, and it requires us to make difficult choices. We've also heard from our browser and device partners that every additional format adds costs (monetary or hardware), and we’re very much aware that these costs are borne by those outside of Google. When we evaluate new media formats, the first question we have to ask is whether the format works best for the web. With respect to new image formats such as JPEG XL, that means we have to look comprehensively at many factors: compression performance across a broad range of images; is the decoder fast, allowing for speedy rendering of smaller images; are there fast encoders, ideally with hardware support, that keep encoding costs reasonable for large users; can we optimize existing formats to meet any new use-cases, rather than adding support for an additional format; do other browsers and OSes support it?
After weighing the data, we’ve decided to stop Chrome’s JPEG XL experiment and remove the code associated with the experiment. [...]
From: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/WjCKc...
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Safari supports jxl since version 17