Regressive JPEGs

(maurycyz.com)

371 points | by vitaut 7 hours ago

20 comments

  • Retr0id 1 hour ago
    I did something very similar with progressive (adam7 interlaced) PNG: https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/adamation/image.png

    > so playback is entirely dependent on network delay

    Ultimately true, but I set up my server to send each "frame" separately, with a fixed delay between each. Each frame is small so unless your network is unusually slow, the timing is set by my server.

  • pavlov 57 minutes ago
    > “Besides unconventional rickrolls and other trolling, this has no practical applications: there's no way to add timing information, so playback is entirely dependent on network delay.”

    A progress bar for something that’s loading in parallel over the same network, to give the user an idea of how much the delay is?

  • robbak 3 hours ago
    That is 1. Cursed, and 2. Definitely in the right place here.
    • alterom 2 hours ago
      This is the stuff that I come here for.
  • inigyou 22 minutes ago
    This website appears to be maliciously using IP address blocking. Here is a less-censored link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260718065449/https://maurycyz....

    Obviously the demonstrations that rely on server-side timing don't work through archive.org.

  • tda 1 hour ago
    I wonder if and how you can use this for steganography, hiding data in plain sight. I bet most automated image analysis programs would only consider the final image. I sure some highschooler can use this to bypass their schools contentfilter
    • aetherspawn 1 hour ago
      Yep this is an AI subversion technique for sure. Put the message to the humans in the first frame, and the message to the AI in the final frame.

      This is how we defeat skynet: by sending each other pictures of cats.

    • mike_hock 1 hour ago
      I can't see any way this would beat regular steganography.
  • remix2000 23 minutes ago
    Wow, Firefox never fully loads the page, while WebKit fails to load it altogether, instead it displays "Operation was cancelled" in system font after a short freeze. I didn't manage to see the images change in any way as the post would suggest though, which left me confused.
  • cousin_it 4 hours ago
    Nice! I think you can approximate timing somewhat, by making your web server create the "jpeg" on the fly and send it to the client in timed chunks. The source could even be a webcam, so the "jpeg" would go on forever.
    • londons_explore 3 hours ago
      There are already webcams which do this- but they use a mime trick for 'multipart/x-mixed-replace'.

      That's basically the server telling the client 'That data I just sent you, well now replace it with this new thing'.

      No JavaScript needed, and can work with plain http and jpeg

    • SahAssar 2 hours ago
      A lot of IP cameras already do this via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_JPEG
    • iwontberude 1 hour ago
      You can do this with the gif too, I have once created a toy cgi that combined a gif sending one frame at a time with an image map allowing you to Remote Desktop with no JavaScript and click around. JPEG may have been a better choice, maybe I’ll revisit this.
  • est 2 hours ago
    > so playback is entirely dependent on network delay

    You can use Service Worker to emulate a slow connection :)

  • Yokohiii 1 hour ago
    Adjacent advice: I've recently played with opengl and jpeg turbo and I wanted to display images fast. I don't remember exact numbers, but enabling progressive for a jpeg was a significant slowdown for decoding. So if anyone like me is stuck with the old school advice that progressive is an nice to have, it's likely not. I personally don't remember any visual progressive image buildup in like decades, so it's not doing anything valuable at all.
    • chronogram 1 hour ago
      I use cjpegli as encoder and it compresses best with its default progressive and full 4:4:4 approach, so it's not only a nice to have feature.
      • Yokohiii 8 minutes ago
        I deliberately was talking about decode speed. The question is if you serve even via moderately fast infra, does it display faster? In my case on a (indeed fast) local system absolutely not. Mere size can be a decode problem of course. But it's extremely hard to tell that a single digit percent size difference is an advantage for serving.

        But if better compression for storage or you can verify progressive serves faster then it is of course a benefit.

        I guess the point I am making is that most people think: I heard it's somehow better so lets use it.

    • Self-Perfection 1 hour ago
      JPEG photos stored as progressive usually take ~5% less space so there is value.

      And it is possible to losslessly transcode JPEG to progressive.

      Lossless transcoding to JPEG XL gives even more space savings though.

    • cubefox 1 hour ago
      Progressive decoding isn't expected to speed up decoding, it's expected to speed up displaying large image files, especially for downloads via slow mobile connections.

      Example: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UphN1_7nP8U

  • fractorial 5 minutes ago
    Now, stuff like _this_ is why I keep coming back to HN.
  • schobi 4 hours ago
    I tried to think about difficult ways to compute the high frequency coefficients to work from the "wrong" coefficients of the first image...

    But this is clever - just smash them together. Low frequency of one image concatenated with high frequency from another. This works surprisingly well!

  • Grimblewald 2 hours ago
    insanity of content aside, that's a really nice website. Kudos.
  • xnx 3 hours ago
    Excellent hack! Should definitely be possible to make an animated gif to jpeg converter. I guess the animation could be slowed a little by repeating frames.
    • londons_explore 3 hours ago
      You can also deliberately have the server sending data at the right rate for the right playback time.

      Easy enough to add a delay() each frame if your server is python/nodejs/PHP/whatever

  • vanderZwan 2 hours ago
    I wonder if you can do this in JPEG-XL. I know that that has actual animation support, but this would be a different thing.
    • cyberrock 2 hours ago
      The format supports progressive decoding but IIRC none of the current browser implementations support it. The first Chrome and Firefox implementations did, and I think it's on their roadmap for the new Rust implementation. No idea about WebKit/Safari.

      Edit: the format also supports region-of-interest decoding and I suspect you can make some cool maps or fractal images with both features. But I think they're not quite prioritizing implementing that right now.

      • vanderZwan 24 minutes ago
        > The first Chrome and Firefox implementations did

        I was about to say: I'm sure I've seen it work a t some point? I imagine it's a valuable thing to add for the web though. It would be really cool if you could use the same image source for thumbnail and full image, and the browser both just figures out how much to download based on pixel size and can resume previously partially downloaded images.

        And yeah, the tiling isn't implemented anywhere yet, jxl doesn't really get enough funding for that. But it'll be really cool once it does since it also makes it really useful for giant images of geographic data. I don't know if it combines with streaming downloads as well, but it would be crazy cool if we effectively got OpenSeaDragon[0] support inside an image format

        [0] https://openseadragon.github.io/

  • korbatz 2 hours ago
    If the online porn industry hasn't used it, it's probably worthless. Still funny, though.
  • LoganDark 2 hours ago
    Safari just freezes in place until the image is entirely finished downloading.
  • solodynamo 2 hours ago
    hmm interesting
  • ilvez 2 hours ago
    My jaw dropped. Very cool. Thanks for sharing.
  • luciana1u 2 hours ago
    [dead]
  • Pijuspaul321 2 hours ago
    Thanks for sharing