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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."
Can someone tell us what's wrong or deficient with JPEG?
HEIF is not an Apple format. Apple only got involved with it years after it was standardized by MPEG in 2015.
Why isnâ(TM)t JPEG 2000 supported on all browsers? Wavelet compression was invented in the 1980s and itâ(TM)s still not supported on all browsers.
Wasn't there another one mentioned here last year that seemed to fade away in developer?
So no, it'll never get replaced.
Is the TIF format.
I still to this day continue to come across these huge pieces of shit, and the lamest excuse not to put a pillow over this image formats head is usually because something something hardware instrument/compatibility, -all bullshit for at least the last 10-15 years.
TIFs need to die and burn in hell.
Heic is an image container. A container is a data structure for the actual still images, in this case encoded as jpegs. As a container its encumbrance is something that will preclude it from use, but jpegs themselves will be replaced by the AV1 codec which should have a bitstream freeze soon. With backing from every major tech company but Apple it'll replace jpegs and video codecs as time goes on, with HDR support and higher storage to quality efficiency it'll be a win for everyone. As for which image container will become standard to go with it, that I don't know.
It is called portable network graphic (PNG). Do people not read?
I generated SHA-256 hashes of all my precious family photos going back 20+ years then deleted the originals. I figure if we ever wanted to look at them, I can just reverse hash 'em!
Trolling is a art,
Can we do that instead?
Nobody deserves to get money without getting work in return. That's stealing! No matter if you call it "license fees", "interest", or "profit".
If it took so much work to create that idea, then we gladly pay what it was worth (with the choice of paying somebody else or refusing to, if you suck). But not a cent more!
If that nonsense was OK, then I could do *precisely* the same act, by making a copy of every bit of money my employer gives me, call it my "pecunial property", put it on the photocopier, buy shit with it until 70 years after my death, have the law protect my exclusivity on doing that, and call everyone who doesn't play along "a thug, murderer and rapist (on the high seas)" .
It'd be funny throwing those criminal imaginary property pieces of shit into a world where that would be normal, but their shit wouldn't, and see them struggle and coil.
If you want to annoy the recipient of your pictures, send them in JPEG 2000 !
Holding this up against JPEG is the wrong standard. Does it outperform PNGs?
We should only need one image format, that automatically identifies the type of image that it is looking at. There is no format today that can take an image of, say, a newspaper page with both text and image on it. Different parts need different image compression techniques. Some lossless, some lossy.
That is something that would be useful. Particularly to non-technical people that do not understand the difference between JPeg and PNG. 15% better compression is a waste of time and certainly not worth confusing the standards space for.
The number of image formats documented for computer systems is pretty big playing field. Do we really need another one? Surely one of the already existing formats will suit the needs of every possible use case, already?
If compression is the goal, I have to question that goal.. is that really necessary? Our storage is getting bigger exponentially, our bandwidth between devices is growing just as fast, is better compression really needed?
I keep all of my files in PiedPiper format. They are tiny and the compression is lossless. It's all about middle out people! What's your D2F ratio?
(For those that don't get it: Google "Silicon Valley TV Show")
http://flif.info/
I guess I knew Spectre and Meltdown were bad, but to completely give up on their chip business because of it is craaaazy!
FLIF
This isn't BBS era computing, we don't use dial-up anymore. get with the times gramps, PNG is perfectly fine.
Why not remove half the useless bloat in your software, os, drivers...
Oh right you don't actually care. You just want people to use YOUR format.
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.
Microsoft and other proponents of VC-1 (SMPTE 421M) thought it too was royalty-free until the patent holders came out of the woodwork, pulled allegedly essential patents out of their waste chutes, and formed a patent pool in MPEG LA.
I seem to remember Google's 2013 license from MPEG LA only covering VP8 and one successor, not what amounts to VP10. From the WebM project's announcement of the license, with my emphasis:
Do we really need lossy compression for still images any longer?
The network is way faster, local memory, storage, and graphics card resources are all way less expensive, and data lost from an image is data lost forever.
What we need is fiber everywhere, or something of equivalent speed.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Nowadays I am using SVG for my websites since they are much smaller in size and scale perfectly for any screen size.
We just had Apple introduce their new format, which isn't bad but is yet another format to deal with
Yes, JPG isn't as efficient, but storage is super-cheap these days and I'd gladly take universal support over slightly better compression.
Nothing other than iStuff knows what to do with it. It's fine, but right now it's inconvenient, so JPG it is.
Does HEIC support transparent backgrounds? That's the only real shortcoming of JPG that has fostered the growth of PNG.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
In two words, probably not. Where do millennial posters even find this stuff? I understand that you are exploring, but damn it's annoying to share the table with you. Where do the grownups go?
Apart from a half dozen esoteric specialty cameras, ALL the digital cameras made in the last 20 years save JPG. The better (more expensive) ones can also save to the specific manufacturer's own proprietary RAW format. Their proprietary bundleware or 3rd party software might take that RAW to TIFF for working on, but the final export is to JPG 99.9999997% of the time. That will not be easy to shift out and replace. One of the biggest barriers will be people wanting to share images in a commonly accessible format.
Betteridge Law == NO
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Got rid of JavaScript and replaced it with a better language didn't we? Oh wait....
Once upon a time... it took my Amiga 3000 (68030@25Mhz) around 30 seconds to decode a 1024x768 JPEG at 15 Bits color depth. Resizing to screen size (usually 800x600), smoothing out artifacts, put in some dithering took another 30 seconds... I dare not to imagine how long it would have taken on a much slower Amiga 500 (68000@7Mhz), not to speak of the infamous JPEG decoder for the CPC6128 which a friend used to convert single pictures OVER NIGHT.
This was no fun at all. I always hated JPEG for being horribly slow. Even my first 486 usually took ten seconds to decode the same picture and only after aquiring the "quick picture viewer 386" from Oliver Fromme. It took Irfanview on early P3 and Athlons to display JPEG without feeling bored...
I hope the new AV1 format will not be a slow poke.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
Our storage is getting bigger exponentially, our bandwidth between devices is growing just as fast, is better compression really needed?
only a really profound idiot would base important technology decisions on the ridiculous assertion that such trends will continue into the future
maybe you would also expect the mobile phone market to continue to expand sales exponentially even after every person already has one
you are the yeast in the glass of sugar water who thinks that they have a long life ahead of them
Maybe using JPEGs for the comparison images wasn't the best choice (at least I can't see much difference by the unnamed and HEIC).
Why did nobody use JPEG2000? It is notably better than JPEG. Both had patent issues, but that hasn't held-up open adoption of the JPEG format.
Well, will they?
It's hard to move billions of people in one direction.
Most folks on this thread seem to be under the impression that 8bit per channel sRGB color space is the end all of reproduction. Sadly it is not and that is one of the biggest things addressed by going to modern formats. The fact that loss factor vs compression ratio is lower is just a bonus.
I was just getting used to png.
Compression artifacts. Take a small (800x600) JPEG photo, and try scaling it up to say 2400x1028 and see what happens. It will "look" blurry and print even worse. I thought SVG (scaled vector graphics) or something similar was suppose to offer a solution to that "jaggie" problem with compression artifacts.
We are in an age of cheap bandwidth and storage. Why are we even bothering with lossy formats any longer? It's not like the dialup era where it took 10 minutes to load a jpg and you had gotten off by the time the image was done loading.
Anything I put on the web these days is PNG
Internet explorer had to be Firefoxed and Chromed before it supported transparent pngs and SVG. Now Microsoft abandoned it for Edge we will have a large amount of users who won’t suppport the new image format and will be forced to support old image formats in enterprises and people who think the internet is the blue e.
That is precisely why it is so attractive.
Read the Wikipedia page. Every choice is elegant and makes sense and is perfect. Mmmbecause we Germans came up with it. <Clarkson's German cousin>
and Notepad is "mich better".
OF COURSE it is simpler , if it has no fucking features, you scared-minimalist pussy!
TIFF (two F, btw; this is not DOS!) was fine, until the degenerates of that generation's equivalent of the WhatTheFuckWG decided to graft in shit left and right without giving any consideration to consistency and compatibility, let alone elegance. First and foremost Adobe!
That is not the format's fault.
Just as it isn't HTML's fault that the nutjobs of the WhatTheFuckWG decided, not to fix their mess of spaghetti code that they call an enigne, and adhere to a clean standard, buz to take the contents of those engines, and pour that nasty shit into the most horrible pseudo-standard ever created. (It's only "living" in a "The Thing" way, where you will perpetually never know what appendages it will have grown the next time you blink.)
The graphics artists hate JPEG (commented on Slashdot).
The scientific imagers hate JPEG (personal experience).
The photographers hate JPEG (commented on Slashdot).
The users don't know any better and couldn't care less as long as they can see what they want to.
So who the fuck decided to put JPEG on every thing that produces anything visual ?
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
https://xkcd.com/927/
try all you want. it took *twenty fucking years* for PNG to get what usage it does see today.. and that was with silly patent trolls on the loose for other formats or compression schemes.
another format simply won't "stick". period. /endofdebate.
optimize your fucking images. nobody wants to download a 20 megabyte logo when they load up your web page or app.
if it's a logo. it should be optimized.
if it's a spot graphic. it should be optimized.
if it's a heading or article picture. optimize it; it's small enough, it won't matter if you use jpg.
if you're sending truly high quality images. you're sending tiff or raw anyway. for anything and everything else, jpg is good enough... if it's not, the recipient can ask for something 'better'.
and newsflash: nobody fucking cares if you have 'truer hues' or some other bullshit in your app or web site images. 99% won't even care, or even notice, if you use a higher compression on jpg.. digital tv (especially cable and satellite) is full of compression artifacts and those same people don't see it there either.
... then programmers need to get a clue and write an interpreter that becomes widespread AND also write a format that allows it to be read by legacy JPEG codecs that are now in use - i.e. at first jpegs will not reduce in file size because you're implementing backwards compatibility so people can make the transition to the new format.
This is news?
We'll make great pets
Do we really need lossy compression for still images any longer?
Absolutely yes. Not even a question. A lot of things you take for granted would literally not be possible or would be notably worse without lossy compression of images. Not to mention that using lossless formats when unnecessary is both wasteful and pointless for many purposes.
The network is way faster, local memory, storage, and graphics card resources are all way less expensive, and data lost from an image is data lost forever.
That doesn't mean storage space and computing power and bandwidth are infinite. And losing data from an image is not necessary a bad thing or worth being concerned about. For example it REALLY does not matter if I lose a bit of data on my pictures from my last vacation. The point is to store a memory, not to archive a well crafted image for all eternity. It simply doesn't matter if I lose a bit of information and the resources necessary to preserve it would cost more than the data is worth. 99.99999% of images taken with a smartphone would not benefit one bit from using lossless compression and in fact many would actually lose utility from doing so.
What we need is fiber everywhere, or something of equivalent speed.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that the main obstacle to using lossless image formats is the speed of the network connection. It's a factor in some cases but not the biggest one in most. Nor would it make it possible/practical to use lossless compression everywhere. You could make every network connection everywhere the fastest fiber connection you can imagine and it lossy compression of images would still be a useful thing.
Thus proving that there are never a shortage of idiots who will insist on using the wrong tool for the job at hand.
More likely it's a case of the proverbial "only tool they have is a hammer so all problems look like nails". Same reasons people use spreadsheets to do things better done by databases. They know how to use a spreadsheet and don't know how to use a database so they make do with what they know how to do even when it isn't the best solution.
Here is a default email reply to customers.
Mail 1) Sorry, we are unable to open your format
Mail 2) Sorry, we are unable to download from an external site
Mail 3) Sorry, we are unable to open your format
Mail 4) We are now able to see the image.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
https://xkcd.com/927/
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
On so many levels...
First, JPEG is not large, it's very small which is why it's so popular. BMP files are large and TIF files are VERY large, but there's no compression in that format so it's pure, and the one to use for the best quality.
JPEG is good enough quality and it's small enough for everybody to use. Anybody can use it without some special license or software.
Whenever Apple or the like is pushing another format, it's because they think they can seize control of that market and require you to use their software or drivers or to have a license.
Sorry about their luck but I will stick with JPEG, or I will create my own format and release it into the public domain.
Great. I'm sure they won't have an upgrade to my expensive Canon so it'll create the new format.
the FLIF format seems to do a nice job in compressing LOSSLESSLY to sizes much smaller than PNG. Why not use that?
On top of that, it's free, open source and patent free.
Work perfectly for me, with thousands of pics, spread on dozens of years and various cameras. Properly handle Raw files along with jpegs too...
I remember I started to consider Darktable seriously, years ago, when I discovered one of their noise filter was far better than any paying thing on the market...
If you don't want to leave Adobe just say this, don't say there are no alternatives.
Herve S.
too bad :-D
Herve S.
320x240 images are 25 KB, and that is way too huge. At (insert website here), we use the new, 15% smaller format. Note that in order to view the static content at said website, your browser must support, download, and execute 15 MB of Javascript and CSS.
-- ducks --
"programmers" should get a clue?
It sounds an awful lot like you couldn't code your way out of a wet paper bag.
Apple never met a standard it didn't either want to own, sell a license to or kill outright. They're remarkably similar to MS in that regard.
Organization? You must be joking..
Why would I read the article? I come to slashdot for the girlz
Anyhow fixing JPEG is not the answer. It has way too many legal issues.
Anyone who complains about it's state likes to send faxes and write checks.