I only recently learned that JPEG and MPEG-1 were designed for near-lossless compression, so the massive bitrate reductions which came further down the road had nothing to do with the original design.
"Inelegant" is the right word; it's hard to shake off the feeling that we might have missed something important. I suspect the next big breakthrough might be waiting for researchers to focus on lower-quality compression specifically, rather than requiring every new codec to improve the state of the art in near-lossless compression.
"Inelegant" is the right word; it's hard to shake off the feeling that we might have missed something important. I suspect the next big breakthrough might be waiting for researchers to focus on lower-quality compression specifically, rather than requiring every new codec to improve the state of the art in near-lossless compression.