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FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

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Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#41
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often do you need lossless images on the web? Almost never.

If the compression is good enough, always. Lossy compression was born out of necessity, after all.

It was not born out of necessity. It was born because of the way your brain percieves the images. There is no need in adding detail if your brain can live happily without it.

And if FLIF achieves such great lossless compression, imagine what amazing compression you can achieve with lossy compression.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#42
post #19

This looks promising! They ought to include time-to-decode in the performance numbers, though: a smaller compressed size doesn't matter if the process of loading and displaying the image takes more time overall. A graph like the ones on this page would be awesome: http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2015/03/03-02-15-oodle-lz-pa...

This! Especially with the web being increasingly consumed on low-powered mobile devices.

It's also not just about being faster than the network because the browser is probably simultaneously doing page layout, javascript parsing, image decompression and a ton of other things. Also more time spent decoding images is a drain on the battery.

Focusing solely on compression stats can be misleading, it's a balancing act. For example, I'm not sure being 0.7x smaller than PNG is much of a win if FLIF ends up being an order of magnitude slower. Perhaps it is still a win but it needs a bit more nuance in the analysis to reach that conclusion.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because isn't open source, and is a proprietary format from Adobe ?

While not Open Source TIFF has age advantages in that close to anything related to it is unencumbered by patents, or will soon cease to be if any do remain. Also TIFF is an open container like MKV and can be used for far more than just simple pictures.

Not to mention TIFF supports layers. From a skim of the homepage, this doesn't.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#44
post #33
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is not that it shouldn't be there again, it's that some potentially interesting stuffs have already been discussed, so the previous thread is probably worth a look too.

You should put that into your first post :) Most of the time I see post like this meaning it was a double post.

My preferred format is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10317790 (1254 points, 157 days ago, 366 comments)

Because it answer most of the common questions about a resubmission: Did it get a lot of exposure? Was it a long time ago? Did it have an interesting discussion that I should read?

The number of comments actually doesn't show if the discussion was interesting of a flamewar. So I sometimes cherrypick some of the most interesting comments and repost a snippet.

(In this case, I think the most important comments are:

- The relation between the progressive and an extension for lossy mode

- The advantages and problems of the (L)GPLv3 licence

But each of them deserve it's own thread here.)

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#45
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just what we need... More ways to shoot our own feet off while trying to improve performance.

First I don't immediately see how to shoot your feet off with this but maybe you can elaborate a bit on why you think so. And secondly, am I getting this right that you are in favor of dumbing everything down while also sacrificing performance on the way because someone could break something?

I'm hardly in favour of dumbing things down, or sacrificing performance. I'm just frequently exposed to issues that are 'magically fixed' by purging the entire browser cache. And I'm just unnerved by the idea of this hash link scheme, we have enough bugs and gaps in the existing system without additional complexity, and that system is pretty damn simple conceptually, yet the bugs remain.

Anecdotally, I used to ship jQuery from a CDN for one project, I had to stop for that project I forget why... But I do remember that to my surprise, it turned out that when I shipped my own version of jQuery from my own domain, I got 10% less client side errors reported back to me in Sentry. The world is full of ways to shoot off your own foot, some of them even start out with someone showing you how they don't shoot their foot off.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#46
Do any of these newer/experimental schemes, such as this one, take into account other factors such as CPU load before declaring themselves as "better". For example this project seems pretty cool, but there's no data on how CPU bound, memory bound, I/O bound its decompression algorithm is.

I guess what I'm asking is, if I hit a web page with 20 images @ 100k per image is it going to nail one or more cores at 100% and drain the battery on my portable device. Fantastic compression is great but what are the trade offs?

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#47

16 bit per channel and on future support for CMYK. Looks like a interesting alternative to TIFF for digital preservation. Sadly, the actual recommended format is TIFF (so, waste of storage space) -> http://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/stillimg.html

> (so, waste of storage space)

To be fair, given the speed at which storage space has grown over the years, it's not really something to worry about in the context of archiving material for future generations (which is very different than being able to quickly download something on the internet now, for example)

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#48
post #28

Honest question. Seriously not trying to dismiss the work. Why not TIFF? 30 years old, already built into nearly every graphics application, supports everything this proposes and more. Plus it is already supported in Safari. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagged_Image_File_Format

Well TIFF has very poor compression leading to large file sizes compared even to PNG. And thus no one uses it on the web.

FLIF has very good compression, it will only download the minimum amount of data required to display the image at it's current resolution. It supports 32-Bit images/animations/transparency. It does animation playback in realtime while it's downloading the file. So as it plays the resolution just increases, you aren't waiting for the next frame to load, only improve. FLIF can also handle the incredibly high resolution images that TIFF is usually used for, and can even do tiled rendering, where it only loads the chunks of the image you are zoomed in at into memory at that resolution. Meaning it takes less time to render those chunks on gigantic images and it uses less memory to do so.

FLIF is an incredibly powerful format that offers a lot. It has archival, scientific, and web purposes. It likely won't be useful to those in 3D or Gaming as files like TGA are better suited for faster reading/loading where as FLIF is a little slower to decompress than PNG. But then again, game devs have been optimizing resource usage for a long time giving models that are further away lower poly counts and lower quality bitmaps/textures. So having one flif image to work at any distant may be of use for them, where they truncate the file at different lengths depending on distance from the camera.

There is a lot to be explored with this format, and it isn't even finalized yet.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While not Open Source TIFF has age advantages in that close to anything related to it is unencumbered by patents, or will soon cease to be if any do remain. Also TIFF is an open container like MKV and can be used for far more than just simple pictures.

Not to mention TIFF supports layers. From a skim of the homepage, this doesn't.

FLIF allows for animation, and it is very possible to interpret each frame of the animation as it's own layer. This would year the same lossless quality as a TIFF at a much smaller file size. Though FLIF isn't intended to be used for this purpose, neither was PNG, and that didn't stop Fireworks from abusing that format and adding layering. The same could be done by someone who wants to add a little meta data to the file to let layered flif opening applications know that the frame are to be interpreted in that manner.

This format isn't complete yet, if layering is important to you, you should join the gitter.im/FLIF-hub/FLIF chat room.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#50
post #39

Incredible work. My only comment is that the progressive loading example reveals that their algorithm seems to have desirable properties for lossy compression as well. Why not make FLIF support lossy and lossless? It's hard enough to get a new image format standardized as it is; offering a lossy mode would effectively give us a two-for-one deal. If PNG had a lossy mode that was even slightly better than JPEG (or exac…

Quoting a fragment from the final section: "[...] any prefix (e.g. partial download) of a compressed file can be used as a reasonable lossy encoding of the entire image." though they also have it listed explicitly in the TODO section: "- Lossy compression"

Current plan is to keep lossless and lossy versions of the format in the same bitstream for encoders/decoders and to differentiate the output files encoded to be lossy as ".flyf" (Free LossY image Format), and those that are encoded as lossless as ".flif" (Free Lossless Image Format).

However renaming the files from flif to flyf or vice versa would have no effect, they would still be opened and decoded the same. It's merely meant to convey to humans the intention of the person who created the image.

From my understanding, not much focus has been given to lossy endcoding as of yet.

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