2254: JPEG2000

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JPEG2000

Title text: I was actually a little relieved when I learned that JPEG2000 was used in the DCI digital cinema standard. I was feeling so bad for it!

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a BADLY COMPRESSED IMAGE. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

JPEG2000 is an image standard created by the Joint Photographic Experts Group from 1997 to 2000 to improve on the original JPEG standard, published in 1992. As of 2020, it is supported by Photoshop and the Safari browser, but remains unsupported and poorly supported by other popular software, including Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers, as well as the free and open source image editor GIMP.

The extensions applied by convention to files using the JPEG2000 standard, .jp2 and .jpx, remain unfamiliar to many users for whom the .jpg extension, denoting the original standard, is well known. The JPEG2000 standard was seen an improvement by its creators, supporting many features not included in the original standard such as multiple resolutions, progressive transmission, a lossless compression option, and alpha transparency. The complexity of fully implementing the standard, as well as patent concerns, may have slowed adoption. The people in the comic seem to have some desire for JPEG2000 adoption, and may have been involved in its creation, and seem to care more about its eventual use than rapid adoption. The "we are in this for the long haul" might refer to the engineers aiming at full adoption by year 12000, the nearest future year ending with 2000.

The core concept of this comic may be about how engineers often expect that a superior technology or standard will catch on, though often other factors keep an "inferior" standard dominant. (See various comics referencing Dvorak keyboards.)

The title text suggests that Randall feels bad that the standard hasn't been adopted, perhaps because he empathizes with the engineers who worked hard to develop it or anthropomorphizes the standard itself, which has been ignored by most of the computer-using world.

Transcript

[Cueball and a woman are both at a table, facing each other, both working on their own respective computers.]

[Cueball leans back and stops typing. The woman continues to type.]

[Cueball looks over at the woman.]

Cueball: I'm starting to worry that JPEG 2000 isn't catching on as fast as we expected.

Woman:: Don't worry! We're in this for the long haul.

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Discussion

Cubeball's keyboard has disappeared in the third panel. 22:24, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Pretty sure the woman in this comic should be called Hairbun. Updating transcript... Ianrbibtitlht (talk) 01:31, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Jpeg2000 is widely used on archive.org (scans are stored as .jp2 there). For example, the image of this page [1] is internally from a jp2.zip file: https://ia601604.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/16/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.215730/2015.215730.The-Theory_jp2.zip&file=2015.215730.The-Theory_jp2/2015.215730.The-Theory_0099.jp2 where BookReaderImages.php seems to be able to read .jp2 in zip and send it to you as a legacy format your browser can handle. Yosei (talk) 01:48, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

I wonder if as a result of this comic, xkcd fans will cause rapid adoption. Mikemk (talk) 05:11, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Looks like it just isn't worth it.

GIMP seems to be able to load JPEG2000 images. To export as JPEG2000, you need an external plugin. Fabben (talk) 12:02, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

That’s correct, I changed the text. --17:06, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

I wonder if Randall is deliberately referencing Valve's Artifact's long haul. Even has a loose connection with image artifacts. 172.68.47.102 12:20, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Would a brief description of the .png format (more typically used for comic images) be appropriate? -- 162.158.78.70 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I was pretty sure that patents were the main problem with adoption, at least in time when .gif patents were a problem. However, it seems the patent status is getting better and it isn't helping ... meanwhile, WEBP, which is using similar technology, is gaining traction. ... which would also answer the question of the previous commenter: while brief mention of PNG might be worth it, mention of WEBP and similar alternatives would be more important -- Hkmaly (talk) 23:46, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

In the US, patents are issued for 20 years, counting from when the application was submitted, which means it should be coming off patent any day now. JamesCurran (talk) 21:44, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

It's also used for textures in Second Life. In fact, that page also states that decompressing JPEG2000 is much more processor-intensive than other image compression methods, so I guess that might be another reason for the lack of general adoption? EddyM (talk) 00:50, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

JPEG2000 is not at all unknown in the geospatial community. Both USGS and NASA offer various aerial and satellite imagery products in JPEG2000 format only. I assume it is one of the most versatile non-proprietary photographic imaging formats out there. 162.158.167.184 06:30, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

When I clicked on th3 .jp2 as ljnked in the Trivia, my tablet wanted to open it only in my (pre-installed bog-standard) ebook reader or GPS Essentials (perhaps confirming 162.158.167.184's comment, just above). But mention of JPEG2000 takes me back (25 years or so!) to a time a similar scare to the GIF patent issue had motivated alternatives to the 'public' common picture standard. And reminds me also of the "masking" technique used on (regular?) JPEGs, based upon keyword-hash shuffling/deshuffling of selected 8x8-pixel DCT units of a JPEG image (and of the hues apllied to the curves) to reversibly censor images, IIRC driven largely by Japanese censorship rules. Somewhere on an old hard disk I must still have the reverse-engineered 'solver' I wrote for that, written in Delphi... ;) 141.101.107.144 18:14, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Odd that Randall would use a lossy JPEG2000 image for a cartoon rather than a lossless one. A friendly reminder that JPEG is best for photography and is not intended for line drawings. Thisisnotatest (talk) 08:04, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

That's his loss, then! 141.101.98.196 17:15, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

I was browsing a series of 70+ page PDFs that was a very high quality image scan, and the PDF browser would regularly grind to a halt for a second or two when trying to move forward a few pages. I eventually discovered that the images were embedded in JPEG2000. They were definitely small file sizes and definitely high quality, but it was just too much. I decoded the entire 500+ pages and re-encoded them as jpeg. Bigger file size, lower resolution, but scrolling was smooth as butter again.

Randall is correct to not really care about the standard's failure, per se, except insofar as he feels sorry for it. The difference between the technical impressiveness of these improvements and their unimportance to reality reminds me of the VHS vs Beta issue. Yes, Beta had the ability to reproduce sound and video of a higher fidelity, but only in a trivial sense indistinguishable to most people under normal conditions, whereas VHS was better at things that were indeed important, like being able to record a full two hour movie when Beta could handle less than one hour. The same thing happened with OS/2 vs Windows...OS/2 was purely object-oriented, a technical distinction that was completely irrelevant to real life, but required four times as much RAM as the typical brand-new computer came with, so it failed. Being able to save 32 bit color profiles and choose whether the compression is lossless is important to me as a graphic artist, but doesn't matter one whit to the typical user, who wouldn't even notice the difference. —Kazvorpal (talk) 17:55, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

The link to the term "betamaxed" doesn't seem to be working... 172.71.26.175 (talk) 03:32, 8 February 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Well, it worked, but was redirecting to a generic page lacking the definition. ;)

Anyway, replaced it with another link that (currently) defines the term. 172.69.194.101 04:01, 8 February 2024 (UTC)