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Can A New Open Photo File Format Replace JPEGs? (cnet.com)
Got lossless compression? An anonymous reader quotes CNET:
Google, Mozilla and others in a group called the Alliance for Open Media are working on a rival photo technology. In testing so far, the images are 15 percent smaller than Apple's HEIC photo format, said Tim Terriberry, a Mozilla principal research engineer working on the project. But smaller sizes are just the beginning... it's got a strong list of allies, an affinity for web publishing and modern features that could make it the best contender yet for overcoming JPEG's 1990s-era shortcomings... JPEG isn't just limited by needlessly large file sizes. It's also weak when it comes to supporting a wider range of bright and dark tones, a broader spectrum of colors, and graphic elements like text and logos...
The HEIC's new rival is from the Alliance for Open Media, a group whose top priority is a video compression technology called AV1 that's free of patent licensing requirements. It's got heavy hitters on board, including top browser makers Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and the most recent new member, Apple -- though Apple's plans haven't been made public. And it's got major streaming-video companies, too: Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Facebook, videoconferencing powerhouse Intel and Google's YouTube. And with the support of chip designers Intel, Nvidia and Arm, AV1 should get the hardware acceleration that's crucial to making video easy on our laptop and phone batteries.
To use Apple's HEIC, "makers of software, processors and phones must jump through a lot of hoops to license patents," which CNET predicts "means HEIC will have trouble succeeding on the web: patent barriers are antithetical to the web's open nature."
The HEIC's new rival is from the Alliance for Open Media, a group whose top priority is a video compression technology called AV1 that's free of patent licensing requirements. It's got heavy hitters on board, including top browser makers Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and the most recent new member, Apple -- though Apple's plans haven't been made public. And it's got major streaming-video companies, too: Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Facebook, videoconferencing powerhouse Intel and Google's YouTube. And with the support of chip designers Intel, Nvidia and Arm, AV1 should get the hardware acceleration that's crucial to making video easy on our laptop and phone batteries.
To use Apple's HEIC, "makers of software, processors and phones must jump through a lot of hoops to license patents," which CNET predicts "means HEIC will have trouble succeeding on the web: patent barriers are antithetical to the web's open nature."
Why not JPEG-LS? It's way faster and lower complexity than png while also yielding much higher compression ratios..
http://xooyoozoo.github.io/yol...
Sadly, I think it's got some stuff caught up in patents or something - the demo is very good.
I must admit, image wise, we haven't gone far in a long time. I'd like to see a very high compression lossless replacement myself and now that I (occassionally) do some light graphics work, JPG NEEDS to die, as soon as humanly possible, it's awful.
At one point, there was a push to make Slash support Unicode better. That ended when vandals figured out how to use bidirectional override code points to spoof moderation scores and otherwise wreck Slashdot's layout. Others used the new code points to post obscene "ASCII art".* That led to a code point whitelist and a halt on further development of Unicode support in Slash.
Rehash, a fork of Slash maintained by SoylentNews PBC, fully supports UTF-8. I don't know exactly what it does with current and future directionality control characters.
* I mean ASCII art in the broad sense: use of characters from other blocks for their glyphs rather than their meaning, in the same way that ASCII art in the strict sense uses Basic Latin.
JPEG2000 compression isn't that much better than JPEG. In some cases it actually looks worse than JPEG at the same file size. See e.g. http://vterrain.org/Imagery/JP...
No point in going to the trouble of deploying a new standard image format everywhere if you don't get huge gains.
Also JPEG2000 only aimed to be royalty-free for "Part 1", the core codec. The patent status of the other 13 parts of the standard is murky.