image compression standards are my jam so i watched the video.

jpeg is a decades-old lossy image compression format that’s historically been pretty good for its purpose of storing adequate quality images while conserving space and especially bandwidth. but there are modern alternatives that are better, including jpeg xl that the author highlights as especially useful because it’s backwards compatible with old jpeg files. and one of the video author’s main arguments is that jpeg xl is robust and future-proof, it will continue to be a file format that’s shareable and readable for many years or even decades to come.

but the modern internet ecosystem (meaning google chromium browser which dropped support for jpeg xl last year) seems to be gravitating towards avif, the av1 image format. it’s a file format for still images based on the av1 video compression algorithm that’s focused more towards maximizing compression, and isn’t backwards compatible with jpeg. another big issue with avif is that it caps out at 12 bits of color resolution compared to 32 bits of color resolution in jpeg xl, which can lead to some unsightly compression artifacts.

jpeg xl is also a much simpler format to encode and decode so it uses less hardware capacity and therefore energy use when creating and displaying many images. and jpeg xl supports progressive decoding, loading up and displaying an initial low quality version of the image and filling it in with finer details, rather than having to load and decode the entire image at once. he also complains about avif headers causing problems, things that will make it more difficult to even read the files in the future, potentially.

that’s about what i got out of the video. personally i agree, i wouldn’t go storing my old photos as avif anytime soon.