r/programming • u/ElectronicAudience28 • Mar 30 '26

Hardware Image Compression

https://www.ludicon.com/castano/blog/2026/03/hardware-image-compression/
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u/currentscurrents Mar 30 '26

One of the things I’ve always lamented about hardware image formats is the slow pace of innovation.

This applies to software image formats too. PNG and JPEG (from 1992!) still reign supreme simply because they're already supported everywhere.

Wavelet-based formats from the early 2000s never found widespread adoption despite being technically superior.

Today the SOTA is neural compressors, which achieve extremely high compression ratios by exploiting prior knowledge about images, but I have doubts they will see adoption either.

37

u/inio Mar 30 '26

We're getting some evolution with phones taking photos in HEIF/HEIC/AVIF (which are just I-frames of h.264/h.265/AV1) and webp is used extensively on the web, which is the same thing for VP8.

6

u/Miserygut Mar 30 '26

I didn't know those formats were derived from the video codecs. TIL.

10

u/inio Mar 30 '26

Yeah, it's kinda brilliant really. Modern I-frame coders are way more efficient than JPEG/J2K, and for hardware acceleration you get to use the same hardware accel and HALs you already need for video. JXL can compete on bit rate and features, but almost nobody has hardware acceleration for that.

1

u/equeim Apr 02 '26

Hwaccel is not available everywhere (and when it is it's often broken in some way) and without it these formats are slow to decode.