Overview of JPEG Snack: A Novel International Standard for the Snack Culture

Most people watch short-form content, especially when viewing it on their smartphones. While short-form content is widely used for entertainment, it is also for essential information sharing with broad audiences. The importance of short-form content is self-evident, as Facebook and YouTube have introduced Facebook Reels and YouTube Shorts, respectively. The rapid, widespread adoption of short-form content indicates the need for a new international standard to ensure the interoperability of broad content and content creation tools. This article overviews a new international standard development effort in the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) in ISO/IEC JTC1/WG1 to create JPEG Snack (ISO/IEC 19566-8) to enable image-rich content creation and sharing. JPEG Snack images, audio, videos, and captions are embedded in the standard JPEG-1 (ISO/IEC 10918-1) image file. The JPEG Snack file comprises two components: i) a default JPEG-1 image and ii) an ISO base media file format (ISOMBFF (ISO/IEC 14496-12)) box-based file extension. The JPEG-1 image portion makes the file compatible with existing JPEG viewers for preview and user navigation, while enhanced JPEG Snack viewers can display the rich image/audio/video/caption short-form content. The article presents essential features of the JPEG Snack and its comparison with JPEG-linked media format (JLINK (ISO/IEC 19566-7)) and JPEG 360 (ISO/IEC 19566-6). It also presents the pros and cons of JPEG Snack over high-efficiency image file format (HEIF (ISO/IEC 23008-12)).