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mozjpeg installation and sample

October 10, 2015
3 comments Linux, Web development, Mozilla

I've written about mozjpeg before where I showed what it can do to a sample directory full of different kinds of JPEGs. But let's get more real. Let's actually install it and look at one thumbnail and one big photo.

To install, I used the pre-compiled binaries from this wonderful site. Like this:

# wget http://mozjpeg.codelove.de/bin/mozjpeg_3.1_amd64.deb
# dpkg -i mozjpeg_3.1_amd64.deb
# ls -l /opt/mozjpeg/bin/cjpeg
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 50784 Sep  3 19:03 /opt/mozjpeg/bin/cjpeg

I don't know why the binary executable becomes called cjpeg but that's fine. Let's put it in $PATH so other users can execute it:

# cd /usr/local/bin
# ln -s /opt/mozjpeg/bin/cjpeg

Now, let's actually use it for something. First we need a realistic lossy thumbnail that we can optimize.

$ wget http://www.peterbe.com/static/cache/eb/f0/ebf08e64e80170dc009e97f6f9681ceb.jpg

This was one of the thumbnails from a previous post called Panasonic Lumix from 2008 or a iPhone 5S from 2014.

Let's optimize!

$ jpeg -outfile ebf08e64e80170dc009e97f6f9681ceb.moz.jpg -optimise ebf08e64e80170dc009e97f6f9681ceb.jpg
$ ls -l ebf08e64e80170dc009e97f6f9681ceb.*
-rw-rw-r-- 1 django django 11391 Sep 26 17:04 ebf08e64e80170dc009e97f6f9681ceb.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 django django  9414 Oct 10 01:40 ebf08e64e80170dc009e97f6f9681ceb.moz.jpg

Yay! It's 17.4% smaller. Saving 1.93Kb.

So what do they look like? See for yourself:

I have to zoom in (⌘-+) 3 times until I can see any difference. But remember, the saving isn't massive but the usecase here is a thumbnail.

So, let's do the same with a non-thumbnail. Some huge JPEG.

$ time cjpeg -outfile Lumix-2.moz.jpg -optimise Lumix-2.jpg
real    0m3.285s
user    0m3.122s
sys     0m0.080s
$ ls -l Lumix*
-rw-rw-r-- 1 django django 4880446 Sep 26 17:20 Lumix-2.jpg
-rw-rw-r-- 1 django django 1546978 Oct 10 02:02 Lumix-2.moz.jpg
$ ls -lh Lumix*
-rw-rw-r-- 1 django django 4.7M Sep 26 17:20 Lumix-2.jpg
-rw-rw-r-- 1 django django 1.5M Oct 10 02:02 Lumix-2.moz.jpg

In other words, from 4.7Mb to 1.5Mb. It's 68.3% the size of the original. And the visual difference?

Again, I have to zoom in 3 times to be able to tell any difference and even when I've done that it's hard to tell which is which.

In conclusion, let's go ahead and use mozjpeg to optimize thumbnails.

Examples of mozjpeg savings

September 1, 2015
5 comments Web development, Mozilla

I'm currently working on a Django library that uses mozjpeg to optimize thumbnails that are generated from stored images. I first wanted to get a feel for how good mozjpeg really is.

In my ~/Downloads directory I have all sorts of "junk" from all sorts of saves and experiments. It'll work as a good testbed of relatively random JPEG images of all sorts of sizes and qualities. Without further ado, here's the results:

FILENAME                                          OPTIMIZE   ORIGINAL     SAVING  PERCENT
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
180697_1836563311933_3364808_n.jpg                  45.2Kb     50.4Kb      5.1Kb    10.2%
2014-03-20 17.35.39.jpg                           2040.1Kb   2207.8Kb    167.7Kb     7.6%
2015-03-04 21.18.16.jpg                           1521.5Kb   1629.2Kb    107.7Kb     6.6%
2015-03-04 21.19.16.jpg                           1602.4Kb   1720.0Kb    117.6Kb     6.8%
2015-03-04 21.23.16.jpg                           1181.7Kb   1272.1Kb     90.4Kb     7.1%
2015-03-05 06.03.00.jpg                           1426.7Kb   1557.7Kb    131.0Kb     8.4%
20150626_200629_001.jpg                           1566.4Kb   1717.3Kb    151.0Kb     8.8%
20150626_200631.jpg                               2157.6Kb   2319.6Kb    162.0Kb     7.0%
Boba_Fett_by_RobD4E.jpg                             96.2Kb    104.3Kb      8.1Kb     7.8%
Horse_Play.jpg                                     170.4Kb    185.2Kb     14.9Kb     8.0%
Image (107).jpg                                    344.9Kb    390.6Kb     45.7Kb    11.7%
Misc Candle Holder NECA FOTR Balrog Dec2002.jpg     37.1Kb     37.7Kb      0.6Kb     1.5%
Mozilla_Lightbeam.jpg                               55.1Kb     79.7Kb     24.6Kb    30.8%
Photo on 12-17-14 at 5.55 PM.jpg                   168.5Kb    187.7Kb     19.2Kb    10.2%
dev.jpg                                             17.5Kb     30.8Kb     13.3Kb    43.2%
dev2.jpg                                            41.1Kb     54.3Kb     13.3Kb    24.4%
dev3.jpg                                            35.3Kb     49.0Kb     13.7Kb    28.0%
dev4.jpg                                            42.0Kb     56.0Kb     14.0Kb    25.0%
dev5.jpg                                            24.6Kb     37.9Kb     13.2Kb    35.0%
dev6.jpg                                            28.9Kb     42.8Kb     13.9Kb    32.4%
hr_0570_220_135__0570220135006.jpg                3124.3Kb   3467.8Kb    343.5Kb     9.9%
hr_0570_220_158__0570220158006.jpg                3010.0Kb   3319.1Kb    309.1Kb     9.3%
hr_0570_220_175__0570220175006.jpg                2245.5Kb   2442.6Kb    197.0Kb     8.1%
hr_0570_227_599__0570227599006.jpg                2561.7Kb   2809.8Kb    248.1Kb     8.8%
hr_0596_622_701__0596622701006.jpg                3238.8Kb   3453.6Kb    214.7Kb     6.2%
hr_0596_623_849__0596623849006.jpg                2902.9Kb   3102.1Kb    199.3Kb     6.4%
hr_0622_219_873__0622219873006.jpg                 985.3Kb   1066.9Kb     81.7Kb     7.7%
logo.jpg                                            43.5Kb     51.2Kb      7.7Kb    15.1%
mvm-header.jpg                                       8.5Kb     12.4Kb      3.9Kb    31.6%
mvm-postcard-picture.jpg                            72.2Kb     73.4Kb      1.3Kb     1.7%
overhang_pixels.jpg                               3014.3Kb   3370.8Kb    356.4Kb    10.6%
peterbe copy.jpg                                     4.2Kb     10.4Kb      6.2Kb    59.7%
peterbe.jpg                                         36.7Kb     44.3Kb      7.5Kb    17.0%
pjt-mcguinty-2.jpg                                  96.8Kb    101.6Kb      4.8Kb     4.8%
sl1.jpg                                             28.7Kb     35.4Kb      6.7Kb    18.9%

That's an median of 9.3% (average of 15.3%) savings.

It's not very fast though. Some of the large files take more than a second. In total it took 23.7 seconds to create all of those optimized files. Do what you want with that fact, bear in mind that these are hopefully "once in a lifetime" operations (depending on the ephemerality of your thumbnail storage). Mind you, the really large JPEGs skew that since the median is 72.1 milliseconds and average is 527.0 milliseconds. Also, when I look through the numbers I find that the large JPGs take the longest but had the least benefit in terms of byte savings.

UPDATE

Chris Adams, in the comment below, inspired me to compare my trials with jpegoptim and jpegrescan. So, I took my script that generated a directory of 45 JPEGs and changed it to use jpegoptim and jpegrescan.

The mozjpeg total size of that output directory is 34.1Mb and it took a total of 23.3 seconds (median 76.4 milliseconds).

The jpegoptim & jpegrescan total size of that output directory is 35.6Mb and it took a total of 4.6 seconds (median 32.1 milliseconds).

In other words, roughly speaking mozjpeg is 4.2% more space effective and 58% slower than jpegoptim & jpegrescan.

Crash-stats just became a whole lot faster

August 25, 2015
0 comments Web development, Mozilla

tl;dr Crash-stats is Mozilla's crash reporter dashboard. Simply fixing the static assets made the site 25% faster.

Before http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150820_X5_V5T/

After http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150824_7F_1C3Q/

(The "First Byte Time" is still terrible but that's for another discussion. We're working on a re-write of the underlying data model for that particular report.)

  • Note how the SpeedIndex dropped from 2823 to 2098 which basically means, you can see stuff sooner.

  • The Load Time used to be 5.7 seconds on average. Now it takes 3.5 seconds.

  • It used to weigh 717 KB to load the whole thing. Now it weighs 326 KB.

The only thing we changed was a long overdue correction of static asset headers and Gzip compression. Now, files with unique URLs (e.g. /static/CACHE/css/23a811f100bc.css) have maximum aggressive cache headers. And now all .js, .css and text/html is Gzipped.

Was it easy to do? Hell no!
Does it matter? Hell yeah! We don't have a lot of users or traffic on these reports but the people who use them do this for a living and making the site feel snappier for them would make their lives more productive.

Using lazy loading images on Air Mozilla

April 23, 2015
0 comments Mozilla, JavaScript

Starting today, (almost) all the thumbnails below the fold on Air Mozilla are not loaded.

The way it works, is that I use a library called Lazyr.js which notices when you scroll down and when certain pictures are going to be in view, it changes the <img> tag's src.

So it basically looks like this:


<article>
  <h3>Event 1</h3>
  <img src="event1.png">
</article>

<article>
  <h3>Event 2</h3>
  <img src="event2.png">
</article>

<article>
  <h3>Event 3</h3>
  <img src="event3.png">
</article>

<article>
  <h3>Event 4</h3>
  <img src="placeholder.png" data-lazyr="event4.png">
</article>

<article>
  <h3>Event 5</h3>
  <img src="placeholder.png" data-lazyr="event5.png">
</article>

<article>
  <h3>Event 6</h3>
  <img src="placeholder.png" data-lazyr="event6.png">
</article>

That means that to load this page it needs to download, only:

event1.png
event2.png
event3.png
placeholder.png

Only 4 images instead of the otherwise 6 (in this example).

When you scroll down to see the rest of the list, it then also downloads:

event4.png
event5.png
event6.png

The actual numbers on Air Mozilla is that there are 10 events page page and I lazy load 6 of them.

You can see the results when comparing this WebPageTest with this one.

There is more work to do though. At the moment, the thumbnails in the sidebar (Trending and Upcoming events) are above the fold when you're browsing but below the fold when you're viewing an individual event. That's something I have yet to implement.

Air Mozilla on Roku

March 5, 2015
2 comments Mozilla

We're proud to announce that we've now published our first Roku channel; Air Mozilla

Browsing for Air Mozilla
We actually started this work in the third quarter of 2014 but the review process for adding a channel is really slow. The people we've talked to have been super friendly and provide really helpful feedback as to changes that need to be made. After the first submission, it took about a month for them to get back to us and after some procrastination we submitted it a second time about a month ago and yesterday we found out it's been fully published. I.e. gone live.

Obviously it would be nice if they could get back to us quicker but another thing they could improve is to appreciate that we're a team. All communication with Roku has been to just me and I always have to forward emails or add my teammates as CC when I communicate with them.

Anyway, now we can start on a version 2. We deliberately kept this first version ultra-simple just to prove that it's possible and not being held back due to feature creep.

What we're looking to add in version 2 are, in no particular order:

  1. Ability to navigate by search
  2. Ability to sign in and see restricted content
  3. Adding Trending events
  4. Ability to see what the upcoming events are

It's going to be much easier to find the energy to work on those features now that we know it's live.

Also, we currently have a problem watching live and archived streams on HTTPS. It's not a huge problem right now because we're not making any restricted content available and we're lucky in that the CDNs we use allow for HTTP traffic equally.

Remember, Air Mozilla is Open Source and we encourage people to jump in and contribute if you want to share your Python, design, Javascript or BrightScript skills.

By the way, the Air Mozilla Roku code is here and there's a README that'll get your started if you want to help out.

Fastest way to take screencaps out of videos

December 19, 2014
1 comment Linux, Web development, Mozilla

tl;dr Don't run ffmpeg over HTTP(S) and use ffmpegthumbnailer

UPDATE tl;dr Download the file then run ffmpeg with -ss HH:MM:SS first. Don't bother with ffmpegthumbnailer

At work I work on something called Air Mozilla. It's a site for hosting live video broadcasts and then archiving those so they can be retrieved later.

Unlike sites like YouTube we can't take a screencap from the video because many videos are future (aka. "upcoming") videos so instead we use a little placeholder thumbnail (for example, the Rust logo).

However, once it has been recorded we want to switch from the logo to an actual screen capture from the video itself. We set up a cronjob that uses ffmpeg to extract these as JPGs and then the users can go in and select whichever picture they like the best.

This is all work in progress by the way (as of December 2014).

One problem is that we have is that the command for extracting JPGs is really slow. So slow that we can't wrap the subprocess in a Django database connection because it's so slow that the database connection is often killed.

The command to extract them looks something like this:

ffmpeg -i https://cdnexample.com/url/to/file.mp4 -r 0.0143 /tmp/screencaps-%02d.jpg

Where the number r is based on the duration and how many pictures we want out. E.g. 0.0143 = 15 * 1049 where 15 is how many JPGs we want and 1049 is a duration of 17 minutes and 29 seconds.

The script I used first was: ffmpeg1.sh

My first experiment was to try to extract one picture at a time, hoping that way, internally, ffmpeg might be able to optimize something.

The second script I used was: ffmpeg2.sh

The third alternative was to try ffmpegthumbnailer which is an intricate wrapper on ffmpeg and it has the benefit that you can produce slightly higher picture quality too.

The third script I used was: ffmpeg3.sh

Bar chart comparing the 3 different scripts
And running these three depend very much on the state of my DSL at the time.

For a video clip that is 17 minutes long and a 138Mb mp4 file.

ffmpeg1.sh   2m0.847s
ffmpeg2.sh   11m46.734s
ffmpeg3.sh   0m29.780s

Clearly it's not efficient to do one screenshot at a time.
Because with ffmpegthumbnailer you can tell it not to reduce the picture quality the total weight of the produced JPGs from ffmpeg1.sh was 784Kb and the total weight from ffmpeg3.sh was 1.5Mb.

Just to try again, I ran a similar experiment with a 35 minutes long and 890Mb mp4 file. And this time I didn't bother with ffmpeg2.sh. The results were:

ffmpeg1.sh   18m21.330s
ffmpeg3.sh   2m48.656s

So that means that using ffmpegthumbnailer is about 5 times faster than ffmpeg. Huge difference!

And now, a curveball!

The reason for doing ffmpeg -i https://... was so that we don't have to first download the whole beast and run the command on a local file. However, in light of how so much longer this takes and my disdain to have to install and depend on a new tool (ffmpegthumbnailer) across all servers. Why not download the whole file and run the ffmpeg command locally.

So I download the file and it's slow because of my, currently, terrible home DSL. Then I run and time them again but just a local file instead:

ffmpeg1.sh   0m20.426s
ffmpeg3.sh   0m0.635s

Did you see that!? That's an insane difference. Clearly doing this command over HTTP(S) is a bad idea. It'll be worth downloading it first.

UPDATE

On Stackoverflow, LordNeckBeard gave a great tip of using the -ss option before in the input file and now it's much faster. At this point. I'm no longer interested in having to bother with ffmpegthumbnailer.

Let's fork ffmpeg2.sh into two versions.

ffmpeg2.1.sh same as ffmpeg2.sh but a downloaded file instead of a remote HTTPS URL.

ffmpeg2.2.sh as ffmpeg2.1.sh except we put the -ss HH:MM:SS before the input file.

Now, let's run them again on the 138Mb file:

# the 138Mb mp4.mp4 file
ffmpeg2.1.sh   2m10.898s
ffmpeg2.2.sh   0m0.672s

187 times faster

And again, I re-ran this again against a bigger file that is 1.4Gb:

# the 1.4Gb mp4-1.44Gb.mp4 file
ffmpeg2.1.sh   10m1.143s
ffmpeg2.2.sh   0m1.428s

420 times faster