The JPEG was compressed to death deliberately, yes. That's the point of the comparison; for the same (tiny) data size BPG gives you a clearly better result. BPG is workable in situations where JPEG isn't.

> For goodness sake, just reduce the resolution if nothing else.

Reducing the resolution would not work and is not the same thing. You would still get 8x8 DC blocks in a smaller JPEG at the same compression rate, and higher detail in the BPG. The BPG is provably better than the JPEG, and since you already know that and talked about it above, I'm a little confused by your argument.

I think there often is a point when reducing the bitrate further while keeping the same resolution is a worse choice than dropping the resolution. I believe one of the tricks of AV1 is to internalise this trade-off.

More generally, doing visual comparisons of codecs is full of traps. Since quality often falls off rapidly at a certain point it's possible to show your codec off by choosing the exact point to compare to maximise the difference. This is almost certainly the case if you're comparing against jpeg and it's starting to totally fall apart.

It's not that it doesn't correctly show that one is worse than the other but it's probably not a good visual reflection of the true scale of the difference any more than ramping up the bitrate until everyone would think they are indistinguishable.

Sure, yes, but the comparison in question isn't the only comparison, it's just one of many. Letting people see the difference visually for themselves is more tangible and less questionable that putting up two file size numbers and claiming they're equal quality. And if you think about it, it similarly wouldn't completely be fair to BPG to turn up the quality so that the JPEG looked reasonably good, because the BPG file would be in the range of diminishing returns per byte.

It is fair to point out that JPEG falls apart below a certain compression threshold while BPG doesn't, even if it's a little bit apples to oranges. I prefer the way @enriquito said it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20419900 but I disagree with the hyperbolic claims in this thread that this comparison is outrageous or complete spin or cheating. It's a data point that has some actual merit, and BTW happens to agree with the other data points we have.

That picture at those dimensions and at that file size will show those artifacts. That's what the demonstration page is trying to show.

But that's completely artificial (and in the circumstances, outrageously spun!), because no one sane would compress a JPEG to a level where the macroblocks become flat blocks. You compress it at a resolution that captures the relevant detail, then display it with a filter that upsamples linearly. Nowhere on the internet is there an image that actually looks like this, because the "problem" being "solved" here doesn't exist in practice.

I mean, it's true that IF you do that, that h.265 will save you by having control over filtering. But that's not a fair comparison, at all.

I think you are missing the point of the comparison. Nobody says that JPEG images like this are common.

The point is rather that you could make a passable image of this bitrate using the better codec. It opens up a new level of compression not possible with JPEG.

If you downsampled the JPEG enough to get the same bitrate without blocking artifacts, it would look like a blurry smear, which is better than a bunch of 8x8 flat blocks but not that much better.

Maybe it would be worth including an additional JPEG downsampled-compressed-decompressed-upsampled view. You’d be able to see that jumping through those hoops doesn’t really give satisfactory results.

> The point is rather that you could make a passable image of this bitrate using the better codec. It opens up a new level of compression not possible with JPEG.

This is simply not correct. Anyone can get a passable image with that bit size. You're trying to stipulate "image pixel size" as some kind of inviolate thing, when it's not in reality. In reality, web content authors don't do insane things with their compression settings (I mean seriously: how would you even produce this? Standard conversion tools, for obvious reasons, will never emit an image like this). This isn't a real argument. This is cheating.

> it would look like a blurry smear,

Assuming facts not in evidence. The image in h.265 is plenty smeary already, FWIW. I think we both know that if this were true, the spin in the link would have done that instead of cheating with macroblock resolution. But in fact the blurry smear looks just fine, so they had to cheat.

Here’s what this image looks like if I rescale the original to half this size, save it using Adobe Photoshop’s JPEG encoder at ~26 kb size, then enlarge it back to double size:

https://i.imgur.com/t8GWPxX.jpg

It looks like garbage. It would still look like garbage if you resized it to some different size and used the appropriate level of JPEG compression to get a 26 kb image. JPEG just isn’t good enough to make this image workable for 1300x900 pixel output using only 26 kb.

> It looks like garbage

Sigh. Not like the garbage in the link above it doesn't. If this was the image in the link we all would have nodded and said "yup, looks about worth a doubling of byte count" and we'd all be in agreement.

Instead, the absurdist misencoded nonsense above gets thrown around as proof that BPG is some kind of revolutionary technology, and a bunch of us have to step in to debunk the silliness.

It's twice as efficient (roughly). Just say that and leave the spin.

What spin? You're the one getting confused about the point of the demo - to show that for very low byte count you can get a reasonably clean BPG image (when compared to JPG it's much much much better or can't you see?); so that people can be more informed about it's relative size/performance ratio at one data point.

I find it amazing that you seem to be adding in all sorts of nonsense about scaling images and filtering and such. It's not relevant to the discussion about at X filesize and res JPEG looks appalling and BPG looks pretty passable.

This is the widest distance between the two formats for sure, but if you want large hires images at very small file sizes BPG is a pretty nice format. As I go on to say the savings are outweighed by the cost of including the decoder plugin and the probably battery and memory cost this incurs.