Hacker News Reader

Comment by traspler | Hacker News Reader

One big problem I have with the image/video format zoo in the browsers is that it becomes an incredible complicated task to get the media out of the browser in a format all the other software can work with. It would be amazing if the browsers offered a built-in „Download & Convert“ feature for images and videos.

Pages automatically defaulting to webp so you try to send the link through a messenger and you might notice that it doesn‘t work for everyone, either iOS users can‘t see it or the messenger interprets it strangely. So you try to save the image and send that, same problem, you get the webp image…

View on HN

I agree with this, and I think for this reason it is best if a new codec gets wide adoption also outside browsers, instead of having the approach of a "web codec" where it suffices that servers and browsers know about it but the wider ecosystem doesn't support it.

WebP in particular, as the name suggests, was conceived as an "image format for the web" and while I think it's good to have the web in mind when designing an image codec, I think it's a bad idea to limit the scope like that. Design decisions like limiting the maximum dimensions and bit depth at the codec level "because that's all the web needs" plus limited attention/focus to adoption outside browsers does lead to the phenomenon you describe where "it doesn't work for everyone", causing the small gain of improved compression to be dwarfed by the huge inconvenience of breaking workflows.

Any new codec of course has this problem even if they do target wide adoption (like JPEG XL): adoption is never instantaneous. It is a fact that the release cycle of browsers is more suitable for innovation than that of most other software, so it does make sense to start there even when it will still cause things to break in software that doesn't support it yet.

To mitigate that, I think it would help a lot of browsers would have a "Save As..." dialog box on images that gives users the choice to save the actual image in whatever format it is in, or to convert it to PNG or JPEG.

> It is a fact that the release cycle of browsers is more suitable for innovation than that of most other software,

Also there is a huge financial incentive for large web hosting companies (e.g. Google, Facebook) to adopt compression formats that save bandwidth, using automated tools to apply those wherever possible.

People making e.g. image archives or building image capture hardware are going to be slower. They don’t want to use new untested technologies that might not succeed, and they don’t want to switch more frequently than necessary. When they do transition it will be by applying new technologies to new images but not immediately transforming older images to use the new technology.

True — which is one of the reasons why JPEG XL includes a risk-free JPEG recompression option: if needed, you can just undo it and get the bit-exact same JPEG files back.

Applying lossy recompression on already-lossy-compressed images is something you should avoid at all cost, since it inevitably causes generation loss (and it is also likely to not be very effective, since you're basically spending a lot of bits in the new codec on replicating compression artifacts of the old codec).

Happy users, faster growing userbase, more e-store revenue, higher click-through rates, lower latency, better quality-of-experience, or more 7-day-returning users can be more important financial incentives than bandwidth. Humans are more than thousands of times more valuable than a computer.

When image quality and observed latency are at a level where users don't care even subconsciously (say, images look like camera originals and load in 100 ms), then bandwidth cost optimization may become a good 2nd objective.

This is a strange argument. The larger companies have plenty of people to work on all the things you mentioned plus bandwidth optimizations. Also, they’re rarely the same people.

The claim (from one of the people working on JPEG XL at Google) is that better image compression is going to reduce latency (or allow higher-quality images) and thereby improve other metrics besides bandwidth costs, giving internet companies even more incentive to adopt better codecs.

We automatically convert user generated images to WebP if feasible and then use the <picture> element to display alternatives (the original format as the fallback). I'm pretty sure that this might be a common pattern.

Browsers could allow a selection of all sources provided by the picture element (this would also include differently scaled variants based on media queries) in a download dialog.

It's not a option doing that if you need to serve a TiB of images and you need, yet, to support IE 11.

JPEG XL on fly conversion to JPEG, offers a nice solution for this use case.

We support IE11 with a polyfill.

The images are converted and stored when they are uploaded or changed. I can see this being an issue with that kind of volume though. But it’s a performance gain for the clients while content doesn’t need to worry about it.

Another solution could be that "someone" creates a library supporting all these formats that everyone else can then use. If the supported formats are queried at run-time, this means that just updating the library will automagically add support into other programs.

You are basically describing libavformat and libavcodec (part of the ffmpeg project)

I believe AmigaOS and BeOS had that, ROX Desktop too? We could replicate the same nowadays via GStreamer, but adoption is hampered by its plug-in system, meaning that most installations are incomplete.

This would significantly increases browser attack surface area. Coders are usually much more complicated than decoders.

Browsers already have to include an encoder for JPEG and PNG. They need that anyway for things like toDataURL(), see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLCanvasE...

The browser has to decompress the image into raw pixels to display it anyway.

Dumping these raw pixels into a trivial intermediate format, like uncompressed PNG or BMP, should not increase the attack surface in any noticeable way.

The input data to an encoder is very simple since it's just pixels. It's possible to find a crash but it would be surprising to find an exploitable one.

I'm worried about whether it will get adoption outside of browsers.

> It would be amazing if the browsers offered a built-in „Download & Convert“ feature for images and videos.

In a way, they already do for images: right-click and "Copy". In some desktop environments, you can even paste that directly into a folder to save it as a file. Dolphin allows choosing which format (of those that the browser can convert to) to save it in.

Chrome does seem to save the JPEG version on some WebP or AVIF URLs where there is also a JPEG version available too, although it seems to be 'clever' about it rather than explicitly offering the option, which can make saving the actual WebP or AVIF mildly annoying.

I've noticed this too but I couldn't determine any clear patterns. It's also very confusing when the file ending in the URL does not match what I download (that's why an explicit "save as" might be better than an implicit auto conversion). I think I also had situations where it did the opposite, download the webp even though the URL had jpeg in the name. I assumed that it's the webserver serving the image being too clever.

I've noticed sometimes that when Cloudflare optimises images and serves up their own WebP versions of your existing images, if you go to save it you get the original jpg/png back.

Presumably the HTTP request that gets sent when you save an image sends different Accept headers.

Doesn't seem to work all the time, but presumably thats down to a combination of different Cloudflare settings, origin server configuration and what format the original image were in too.

My guess is that the HTTP client request, when you do right click "Save Image As", is sent with Cache-Control:no-cache and Pragma:no-cache headers. Which bypasses Cloudflare.

I think it just re-requests without the "Accept: image/webp" in the request header, so you get whatever the server would have sent to a browser that doesn't know about WebP.

That seems like it would have to be an unusual hardcoded path in the browser's code. I can't figure out why it would do that.

Too many complaints that they downloaded a picture from the web that their image viewer can't open maybe?

At the same time content providers are trying to make it as difficult as possible to 'steal' their videos and images.

>> At the same time content providers are trying to make it as difficult as possible to 'steal' their videos and images.

Well, screenshot is a thing for images. Video is another story.

OBS works great for screenshoting videos.

I like how you put steal in quotes to minimize the fact that is what you are doing. If you walk into an art gallery or musuem, you can't just take art of the wall and walk out with it. Just because the gallery is a website, people feel like they can just right-click and save as and walk out the door with it. Yet, people understand that highlighting text copy&pasting it into their own work is plagiarism. I honestly do not understand the disconnect. If the website felt like the imagery should be free for people to do what they want with, then they would provide a link to a higher quality image rather than a highly compressed one.

Wonky comparison, as plagiarism involves claiming authorship/evading citing, not literally copying text and keeping it somewhere else. I CAN go and copy text from any textbook into my notebook without consequences, why couldn't I download a copy of an image?

Did you ask for permission and were granted permission to take that image from the server for any other use than for viewing in a browser? What is the purpose of downloading the image? To share with friends? Why not send a link to the site? To use a desktop background? Did you pay to license for that use? To store on your phone for your own personal enjoyment? Again, why not reload the website?

As a lowly end user not intending to widely redistribute the content, I decline this absurd level of responsibility, and the doctrine of fair use would tend to agree.

And as long as websites tend to modify, delete, move, or otherwise play games with urls and content, I will see value in saving a permanent copy. That I should be able to do that is frankly how the internet was intended to function; if that's not desirable for the content, then perhaps it should not be published on the internet at all.

>And as long as websites tend to modify, delete, move, or otherwise play games with urls and content <snip> then perhaps it should not be published on the internet at all.

Except an artist can deliberately decide to only make an image publicly available for a limited time, and therefore taken the image down from the website. Just like art moves from museum to museum, an artist can allow an image to be used within a pre-defined window. Just because you have the technical know how to extract an image that is not readibly downloadable via the UI does not mean you should.

Maybe one of the features of JXL would be a timebomb type of setting where after a certain date the data is no longer useable.

I sympathize with both sides of this argument. I get that info wants to be free blah blah, but I also understand that artists are in a difficult situation with the internet. I mean, an artist's work posted on the internet is not the cure for cancer, or basic information on algebra where the info should be evergreen. The group think is more of "I want what I want" vs consideration for what the artist's intentions are. If you enjoy an image so much that you're willing to go to the effort to get the image, why not acquire the image throuh legit method?

If someone saves an image for private use, that doesn't interfere with limited public availability.

> If you enjoy an image so much that you're willing to go to the effort to get the image, why not acquire the image throuh legit method?

Do you make the same argument when people use a VHS? If you're willing to go through the effort to press the record button, you should go buy a copy for $20?

Depends on the purpose the use of the VHS. Copying something you brought home from Blockbuster would definitely qualify. Recording something off of TV to watch at a later more convenient time was just the precursor to DVR.

The image file you downloaded from someone's website without their permission in miles better in quality than the stupid VHS. It's more like the DVD/Blu-ray you ripped from your buddy that actually paid for it. Just because you can doesn't mean you should

Saving an image is very high quality. But so is DVR. Usually a DVR copy is perfect.

DVR sounds like a very good analogy to me. The website is showing you something, and you make a personal capture that you can replay at any time. It was distributed to you specifically, and you're time-shifting it. You're not taking a personal copy held by one person and making it two personal copies held by two people, which is what happens when you rip someone else's DVD. And the same way, you shouldn't take that image you saved and start distributing it around.

Some countries, like France <https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI0000...> and Switzerland <https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1993/1798_1798_1798/en#ti...>, cite several exceptions to copyright including private copying.

It's a bad metaphor, because if you take the image from the gallery, other people cannot enjoy it anymore, while with the right click/save you make a copy, so it's still there for everyone.

A better analogy would be if you make a painting of a painting without paying the original artist, is it stealing ?

It's not : it can be construed as counterfeiting though, and it might cause the artist to stop painting because he does not make enough money, but calling it stealing is simply wrong.

Okay, so you're one of those hung up on a definition. What do you call it when you use something without someone's explicit permission whether because you didn't ask for it first or knowingly using it after it has been posted on a website that you do not have permission to use it?

Normally, discussions about semantics are indeed pointless. But this is a rare exception.

The word "steal" is chosen because it carries a strong negative connotation. It is an example of loaded language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_language).

Regardless of whether it's ethical to copy whatever files in whatever situation being discussed, the term "steal" is intended to sidestep that question and make it feel unethical by drawing an equivalence between it and something most people agree is unethical.

It's a slightly underhanded rhetorical technique, so it's reasonable to put the word "steal" in quotation marks to call attention to it.

Depends on the context. If the person loses access to what I'm taking (typical in the physical world), stealing. If the person does not loses access (typical in the virtual world or with artificial scarcity items), counterfeiting.

And you're okay with being an counterfeiter?

Yea its awful the number of sites that use .jpg but its actualy a webp with the wrong extension, like thanks I hate it.

Thanks Clouflare for that.

What would be even more amazing, is that browsers would compress / convert formats on upload. Especially video. It's stupid to upload gigabytes of raw video to a server which then compresses it to a few megabytes.

If you're willing for your video to suffer quality from bad compression settings because your browser is a "dumb" tool that just applies some preconfigured compression scheme, then great. Also, how many people are going to accept that instead of just uploading files and seeing immediate progress vs waiting for a browser to compress a file from some sub-$500 laptop? What codec is it encoding to? H.265? good luck getting that to complete this week on that cheap laptop.

I always hated when people sent me screenshots instead of just downloading the images, but for the reasons you mentioned I know often find myself screenshotting stuff....

At least I cut the image so it's not obvious

Reminds me of the native plugin days where based on mine type, a plugin would handle the content.

Could WASM in an extension be good enough for some use cases like this?

Desktop Firefox already has it.

Right click — "Copy image" — paste into any program that supports PNG.

On Android though this is not the case.

Really? I'm getting "your browser does not support JPEG XL" in Firefox.

I mean the way to export an arbitrary image in an open format, not JPEG XL support yet.

You can try Firefox Nightly with the jxl flag enabled...

It is a bad idea with lossy compression. Every convertation will make quality worse.

Really? I find browsers as a software that recognizes fewest number of image formats.

ImageMagick is just few keystroke away and you can convert to almost any format you like.

Google Image search even does this! Incredibly annoying - only to go to the source image itself and find it to be JPEG or PNG.

Very confused as to why this is done - anyone?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com