Generation Loss – JPEG, WebP, JPEG XL, AVIF
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters cite it as visual evidence that JPEG XL survives repeated lossy recompression far better than WebP and other formats, in arguments over format adoption.
Recommended by 0 people across 0 different months, 2024 to 2026.
What it is
A 41-second demo by Jon Sneyers, a JPEG XL developer, showing generation loss: an image is repeatedly re-encoded in JPEG, WebP, JPEG XL and AVIF, so the quality degradation of each format can be compared. The description lists the encoder versions used.
What people said
Cites archerx · 2024-01 · Hacker News · on “Samsung Joins Apple and Adobe in Supporting JPEG XL”
I associate it with google, and I have associated google with bad and untrustworthy. Also google's hostility towards jpeg xl makes me even more apprehensive of their format and the way they tried to push it so hard. Also jpeg XL is just much better than webp. [this video]
Cites greenavocado · 2025-03 · Hacker News · on “Blasting Past WebP - An analysis of the NSO BLASTPASS iMessage exploit”
JPEG-XL is the future everything else is forced/shilled to the extreme without considering its merits. Don't even get me started how some website will show a URL to a JPEG and when you try to save it, it tries to save a WebP. WebP suffers from excessive generation loss for a modern codec. [this video]
Cites farlight · 2026-10 · Hacker News · on “Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome”
This doesn't really solve the problem, but the good news is jxl has excellent generation loss in lossy mode compared to other formats, if you recompress it with high quality, it keeps original quality pretty well. Unlike older formats: [this video]