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Comment by jampekka | Hacker News Reader

JPEG-2000 may have poisoned the well. I still, for some irrational reason, get a flashback of it whenever JPEG XL is mentioned.

Maybe JPEG earned that with pushing a deliberately patent infested codec with horrible proprietary implementations? And at the time when the god damn GIF patents were causing grief, and h.264 trolls were on the rise.

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I do not consider JPEG 2000 to be a failure even if it did not displace the old JPEG in all applications. JPEG 2000 “succeeded” but not on the Web. Most people have probably seen more JPEG 2000s than all other image formats combined. Whenever you go watch a movie in theatres you see 24 of them every second; roughly 173,000 for a two hour feature. There were a few open implementations like OpenJPEG, which is the one I use.

Could it be argued that a format being patent encumbered was less in focus back then, that "codecs are covered by patents and users of a codec must pay royalties to the patent holders" was just the more or less unquestioned "way things were" back then by groups like ISO? The original JPEG was also patent encumbered after all.

This is not a rhetorical question, I was way too young back then to have been aware of the conversations which were going on regarding JPEG-2000. I see that PNG was developed specifically to be unencumbered, which suggests that at least some groups were focused on it, to your point. But I can't tell if that was a mainstream concern at the time like it is now.

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