alwaysInBeta Stable software is for the weak

Space saving with MozJPEG date: 2015-01-01 21:53:55+00:00 categories: - Linux tags: - tools

Today, I read a post about MozJPEG, and decided that it looked interesting enough to try out. This post is mostly based on that post, but a little more step-by-step.

  1. Download a release version of the source from GitHub

  2. Extract someplace convenent

    cd $HOME/.local/src && tar xaf ~/Downloads/mozjpeg-3.0-release-source.tar.gz

  3. Build like any other source

    cd mozjpeg/ export CFLAGS="-march=native -O2 -pipe -fstack-protector —param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -DFORTIFYSOURCE=2" # optional, taken from my /etc/makepkg.conf ./configure —prefix=$HOME/.local && make && make install

  4. Test it!

    cd $HOME/tmp mkdir mozjpeg cd mozjpeg use graphical file manager to copy in some pictures /home/brian/.local/bin/cjpeg -quality 80 -outfile test.jpg 7A5bkcC.jpg

This works fine on JPEGs and PNGs, but when I tried a GIF it errored out: "GIF input is unsupported for legal reasons. Sorry." No worries, you can use another utility to convert the GIF and pipe it in:


convert mypicture.gif  TGA:- | /home/brian/.local/bin/cjpeg -quality 70 -outfile gifconverted.jpg

  1. Automate it If you're comfortable that this doesn't hurt image quality noticeably and don't mind ugly filenames, you can convert whole batches of images.

    for f in ./.jpg; do /home/brian/.local/bin/cjpeg -quality 80 -outfile "$f.jpg" "$f" && rm "$f" ; done; for f in ./.png; do /home/brian/.local/bin/cjpeg -quality 80 -outfile "$f.jpg" "$f" && rm "$f" ; done;

You could do this with GIFs, but this is a bad idea because most GIFs are animated and not still images.