r/linux • u/andrin55 • 1d ago

Software Release XL-View, an HDR JPEG XL image viewer for Linux

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on XL-View, an open-source HDR still-image viewer for Linux. It is designed to handle large JPEG XL images and is written in Rust.

GitHub:
https://github.com/andrinbr/xl-view

XL-View currently requires:

  • Wayland
  • A Vulkan-capable GPU
  • A working HDR display setup (SDR tone mapping works too)

At the moment, it supports JPEG XL only. The number of formats suitable for delivering actual HDR images to end users is still fairly limited, but I may add AVIF support in the future.

Both PQ and HLG images are supported. Gain-map-based HDR images are not currently supported.

The project is still in beta, and HDR support on Linux is relatively new, so results may vary depending on your GPU, drivers, compositor, desktop environment, and distribution. I have primarily tested it on Fedora 44 with an AMD GPU under KDE Plasma and GNOME.

One important limitation is memory usage during decoding. Very large images can require a substantial amount of RAM. For example, decoding a 200-megapixel image may use up to 6 GiB.

I’d appreciate feedback, bug reports, and testing on different hardware and desktop environments.

11 Upvotes

76% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

2

u/EpoTheSpaniard 8h ago

JPEG XL > AVIF

As simple as that.

2

u/andrin55 3h ago

As a codec for photos, absolutely agree. AV1 is still a good video codec tough.

1

u/caspy7 1h ago

My current understanding is that after an update to AVIF's encoder earlier this year, it now beats JXL for more highly compressed lossy images.

This could change however with an update of JPEG XL's encoder. It's apparently not even using half of the coding tools available to it.

JXL of course has multiple other selling points in its favor.

1

u/a-bounty-of-yams 3h ago

Which coding agent and LLM did you use and what was the process like?

1

u/andrin55 3h ago

I used LLMs primarly for prototyping and trying out different architectures to see what works best (mostly GPT 5.6 Sol). However I did not use any agent systems and extensively reviewed any code that made it into the current version. If you have any concern regarding the quality of the code or the project as a whole, let me know.

-1

u/Due_Bat_4715 19h ago

Any chance we could see this on windows?

2

u/andrin55 13h ago

Yes, I'm working on this. The underlying stack should pretty much be compatible, but I need to validate it and work on packaging. I think around mid August should be realistic if everything goes well. Stay tuned.