Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/cloudinarymarketing/imagecon-2019...

Background: JPEG XL is a combination of Cloudinary's FUIF [1] (successor of FLIF [2]) and Google's Pik [3].

Committee Draft (Aug 2019): https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.03565

Technical Details: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of...

Features / Goals:

- high quality compression (> 60% over JPEG-1)

- royalty-free with open source implementations available from the start

- versatile: supports alpha transparency, high bit depth (16-bit), lossless compression, animations

- progressive decoding / "responsive by design"

- legacy-friendly: reversible transcoding of JPEGs with 22% size reduction (demo available [4])

Comparisons:

- JPEG 2000, JPEG XR: only marginal compression improvements

- WebP: limited (8-bit, 4:2:0), no progressive decoding

- BPG/HEIF (HEVC): patent-encumbered (not royalty-free), no progressive decoding, complex

- AVIF (AV1): no progressive decoding, complex, slow?

[1] https://cloudinary.com/blog/introducing_fuif_responsive_imag...

[2] http://flif.info/

[3] https://github.com/google/pik

[4] https://google.github.io/brunsli/

From the video I was expecting even higher compression than HEIF, but > 60% over JPEG-1 seems to be about the same as HEIF.

And what are the downside? Whenever something sounds too good to be true it often means we are overlooking something.

There is a Japanese independent (simple) comparison between av1, bpg, WebP and pik for use in photo compression. Pik won it. JPEG XL is an improved from pik.

https://qiita.com/fg11894