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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."
HEIF is not an Apple format. Apple only got involved with it years after it was standardized by MPEG in 2015.
Can someone tell us what's wrong or deficient with JPEG?
Quoting the post (not even the linked text):
"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..."
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.
24-bit PNGs are lossless, so if they incorporate photographic elements, the compression ratio is very bad.
An image format that balances lossy compression for photographic content but which can also efficiently handle graphic elements efficiently without major artifacts would be a good thing.
Graphic artist for 13 years here: FUCK JPEG.
AV1 outperforms JPEG. AV1 delivers a smaller file size at the same quality or better quality at the same file size. Try this comparison of JPEG and AV1 at the same file size.
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,
Why not JPEG-LS? It's way faster and lower complexity than png while also yielding much higher compression ratios..
If you want to annoy the recipient of your pictures, send them in JPEG 2000 !
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?
Heic is an image container.
You're thinkig of HEIF. HEIC is the file extension convention Apple adopted to indicate a HEIF file which contains HEVC encoded images.
With backing from every major tech company but Apple
No. Apple has joined the Alliance for Open Media. So Apple is an AV1 backer as well.
Of course they are saved as PNG. Saving the output losslessly as PNG allows the comparison to be made without AV1 or HEVC still image support.
PNG doesn't replace JPEG. JPEG enables lossy compression for a smaller file size, PNG does not. AV1 has both lossy and lossless modes. AV1 lossless outperforms PNG. Lossless WebP (based on VP8, an ancestor of AV1) also outperforms PNG.
I've always hated it if I have a graphic arts hat on, and yet when as an amateur photographer I end up rendering to jpeg in the end.
We need a new format, then we need to wait 10 years for The Store Formerly Known as Kinkos to buy "copiers" (printers) that support the format, and we'll be free of choosing between TIFF (80M file size limit and lack of compression support on most public printers makes this unrealistic), PDF with embedded JPEGs, or JPEG.
For internet use of course the thrash rate is much higher. The need seems less though, monitors already display as much bit depth as they are capable of.
A better format is a much bigger deal for print than web.
Something like a restaurant menu has to be printable on standard digital printers at a local print shop.
And in an ironic twist of fate, 50MB animated GIFs replaced 1MB MP4s for short silent video clips.
#DeleteFacebook
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.
Sounds like you want magic, if I'm doing preservation work I might want it all lossless. I might be scanning a photo book where I care about the pictures or a ledger where I care about the text. What if the text is added on top of the photo or blended into it with transparency? What's text anyway, is it black on white or is it runes and hieroglyphics and stone tables and scrolls? If you want to mix it up I think you should just go with a document format like PDF because the text is probably better off being OCR'd unless you're trying to preserve a particular look.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
JPEG was made for photography, therefore you have no business using it for graphic design. If you do use it, it tells me you are incompetent.
But you, in all your intellectual superiority, don't have the reading comprehension to grasp the (very valid) point he just made about the real world that handles your output for things like printing. NOBODY CARES what file format you work in, archive in, render from or anything else. What matters is what you can transport to the end user or print shop in real life. Which, if you were competent yourself, you'd know.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Blah blah evil corporate corporations with sinister corporate evil corporateness. No, the reason is entirely technical and quality-related. Which you know, but are pretending is just some side issue so you can rant about Teh Evil Corporate Corporations.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
And in an ironic twist of fate, 50MB animated GIFs replaced 1MB MP4s for short silent video clips.
Thus proving that there are never a shortage of idiots who will insist on using the wrong tool for the job at hand.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
PNG does lossless far better. TIFF does need to die. Aside from the poor compression, the format itself is a horrific mess.
I write image processing applications, and part of that is writing loaders - I know TIFF is a mess. Just go read the PNG spec, then the TIFF spec. That'll convince you if you are able to grasp the specs.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Sorry, but Adobe is the one that does the fucking in that relationship. The world's artists collectively decided that nothing Adobe does can ever drive them from Photoshop, so every month, bend over, pants down...
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The need for "lossy compression for photographic content" belongs to the time when 640 K was more RAM than anyone would ever need and a modem faster than 2400 baud was too fast for even the best speed reader. Back when the big argument was how to best partition that 40 MB hard disk: 32/8 to get the biggest possible C: drive? 20/20 so C: and D: were equal size? Or the common compromise: 30 and 10?
PNG does not compress as well as JPG, but the difference between a display latency of 32 microseconds and one of 53 microseconds is meaningless when eyeball latency is measured in milliseconds. The number of users whose internet connection is so slow that they would notice the difference between JPG and PNG is a vanishing quantity, and those stuck in the slowest of the slow lanes are undoubtedly experiencing other problems with unwanted pop-up ads and gawdawefool redundancies in posts from people who don't know how to unnecessary repetitions of old news.
I'm sure there is at least one good argument for replacing JPG with a brand new format; I'm certain that there is some edge case out there where PNG would not serve well. But I cannot think of it.
oh wait: Mars to Earth true color 4 K images of alien sand. Maybe, that would be a use case. Maybe.
...or at least let software catch up before it's set as the 'default' in image-taking devices.
Coworkers need to take photos of products for me for example, and everyone with an iPhone has to change settings so HEIC isn't the default, since Photoshop doesn't recognize them (at least my PC's CS6 doesn't) for uploads to, like, Google Drive. Some are not tech literate at all, so this is a fairly big hassle for them, and it makes working with other people a pain..first time it happened I had no idea what was going on, all of a sudden I'm staring at an HEIC file..wtf?
Yes, is definitely a thing:
http://makeanddo4d.com/spreads... :)
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.
PNG does not compress as well as JPG, but the difference between a display latency of 32 microseconds and one of 53 microseconds is meaningless when eyeball latency is measured in milliseconds
Microseconds? You're off by a factor of 1000.
I took a 1024x640 TIFF photograph I had laying around and converted it to a 50KB jpg with moderate compression and a 500KB PNG and uploaded them to a well connected web server (10Gbit interface to the internet)
Then loaded them both in my home computer's browser. The jpg file took 86msec (that's milliseconds, not microseconds) to load, and the PNG file took 796msec (average of 5 tries). My home internet connection is 100mbit, pretty decent by American standards, if not by world standards.
I don't know about you, but I can definitely notice the difference between 800 msec and 80 msec.
I get why JPEG isn't perfect but the big issue here is that for the vast and overwhelming use cases, JPEG is "good enough".
It's going to be hard to come up with an alternative that's not ridiculously patent encumbered.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Other places use paper that makes sense. One sheet of A0 is 1 square meter with an aspect ratio of sqrt(2). Keep cutting it in half to get A1, A2, A3, and so on, all with the same aspect ratio. A4 is close to 8.5x11, and is used for the same things. Metric paper really shines when you want to shrink/enlarge to the next paper size, thanks to the common aspect ratio.
http://www.tvgohome.com/faq.ht...
11. Why use a JPEG for the listings instead of text?
Because I want precise control over the layout. And because it seriously annoys "real ale" Internet users who do all their browsing on text-based hand-held calculators, and that arouses me.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
AOM uses a clever license that basically means you can't sue people over AOM codecs while at the same time using them yourself. More details: https://tech.slashdot.org/comm...
With all the backing AOM has, supporting its codecs will be mandatory for tech companies that make real products, so they will not want to sue AOM codec users.
Pure patent troll outfits can have a go, and some probably will. But AOM will fight, and probably win, perhaps buying off the plaintiffs if that becomes necessary.
Opus has been out for years and despite a lot of noise from holders of audio patents, Opus is fine.
The problem is expecting the transport and storage standards to catch up after all other standards have.
Cameras capture wider colour ranges at better bit depths than they used to. Monitors have gone not only to wider colour gamuts but also to HDR. The average consumer now has access to equipment that outperforms the standard storage mechanism.
The problem here is that the user is driving the adoption. It's why JPEG2000 hasn't replaced JPEG, or why any of the other better than JPEG filetypes have done so either. In the mean time the content producers are the ones driving adoption of other storage standards. You buy a UHD bluray with Dolby Vision encoded movie, or stream an online video in 12bit HEVC. Why would you be happy visiting a website and seeing an image encoded in something from the 90s that results in banding and poor dynamic range when attempting to convey the full spectrum of what your equipment is capable of?
TIFF is a container format, not an image storage format. There's big difference in scope between PNG and TIFF. The defining a container is what makes TIFF so messy, but it is also what makes it far more useful than PNG. It has far more flexibility and PNG can't replace it in all cases. Classic point: You can't even save a 32bpp file in PNG as it tops out at 16bpp.
I think the parent poster wanted to say bits per channel not bits per pixel. 32bits per pixel is 8 bits per channel (R G B) with an 8 bit alpha channel, and 16bpc would give you 48bpp (RGB) or 64bpp(RGBA). Tiff will do 32 bits per channel or 96 bits per pixel (no alpha channel) or 128bits per pixel with an alpha channel.
Time to offend someone
WebP is great. Better lossless compression than PNG. Better lossy compression quality than jpg for comparable size. Support for lossy compression with alpha (and even lossy alpha). Unfortunately, it is not supported by IE, Edge, Safari or Firefox (although the last two are "experimenting with supporting WebP images"). See caniuse.
https://caniuse.com/#search=we...
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.
Correction: YOU don't see the artifacts & aren't bothered by them. Quite a few programmers do, and find them to be highly objectionable. Ergo, programmers are most highly-motivated to solve problems that annoy programmers, even if "normal people" don't care.
Specific example: telecine judder. "Normal" people see it & think "film look". Programmers see it & think, "how can I change the native framerate to an integer multiple of 24 to match, and/or algorithmically-tween additional synthetic frames to make the motion smoother?"
I get why JPEG isn't perfect but the big issue here is that for the vast and overwhelming use cases, JPEG is "good enough".
It's going to be hard to come up with an alternative that's not ridiculously patent encumbered.
I don't think patents are the most serious issue. It's a handy whipping boy, but the legacy installed base is the big one.
There have been numerous "replacements" to JPEG, as well as other image formats. It took decades for the vastly suprior PNG to overtake GIF (even with patent issues in GIF), but even then, GIF is very much alive and well.
The same can be said about older video codecs (Many Blu-rays are still encoded using MPEG-II, in spite of the availability of better codecs). Nobody complains about the 1992-era Dolby AC-3 audio on DVD's, and 1993's MP3 shows no few of slowing down, in spite of considerably better codecs being developed & deployed in the past two decades.
The bottom line is that while higher quality is possible, the "better" level isn't enough for most people to even care.
Glare on your device's screen can make a bigger difference.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.