I've been working on a pure Ruby JPEG encoder and a bug led me to an effect I wanted. The output looked just like the "crunchy" JPEGs my 2000-era Kodak digital camera used to put out, but it turns out the encoder wasn't following the zig-zag pattern properly but just going in raster order. I'm now on a quest to figure out if some early digital cameras had similar encoding bugs because their JPEG output was often horrendous compared to what you'd expect for the filesize.

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Gigachad an hour ago | parent [-]

Quite a lot of hardware devices have broken encoders. I noticed just how inconsistent it is if software will tolerate invalid files or work around it.

Seems these days a there’s more of a preference to outright refuse invalid files since they could be exploit attempts.

	▲	petercooper 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The interesting thing about the situation I mentioned is that while the encoding algorithm was wrong, the actual output was valid JPEG that simply didn't look quite visually correct. But you're right, invalid encoding can be a problem too, and I have noticed during testing that a lot of decoders are quite forgiving of it.