Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

HEIF – High Efficiency Image File Format

nokiatech.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 122 posts

Re: HEIF – High Efficiency Image File Format

#51

Post by Veratyr »

niftich wrote: post #20

This seems conceptually most similar to Fabrice Bellard's proposal 'BPG' [1], which was essentially a lightweight wrapper around an HEVC I-frame. The format got small amounts of attention in encoding circles, but didn't pick up mainstream traction. The image encoding layer of HEIF is the same HEVC, but the container is MPEG-4 Part 12 (the Quicktime-descendant ISO Base Media Format; the core behind .mp4, .3gp, etc.),…

> The video codec AV1 currently in development was supposed to be a grand alliance of disparate companies to agree on a common format for the future, and rectify the WebM vs. non-WebM split, but continuing to promulgate sophisticated formats based on work outside of this scope (such as MPEG- or ITU-derived custom formats) just muddies this further.

Apple is just blatantly not interested in cooperating with the rest of the market. Mozilla, Google and Microsoft are all part of AoM, along with a bunch of hardware companies and distributors yet Apple is absent and apparently pursuing HEVC instead.

This isn't new either, Apple pushed HLS when others were pushing DASH and MPEG-TS when others were pushing fragmented MP4.

They seem really determined to go their own way and ignore everyone else for some reason.

Re: HEIF – High Efficiency Image File Format

#53

Post by _punw »

threeseed wrote: post #47
hoschicz wrote: post #35

It's really sad that Apple decided to support the proprietary H.265 and this image format instead of the royalty-free WebP and WebM.

I think you're confused. WebM is a container not a codec. And either way VP9 and AV1 are simply inferior codecs to H.265 in almost every way. And as for royalty free well that's because MPEG-LA has't ever sued but they did give a royalty free license to Google for patents infringed by VP9. And since Google accepted it does indicate that AV1 is likely to also be patent encumbered. We would all like a royalty free code…

> And either way VP9 and AV1 are simply inferior codecs to H.265 in almost every way.

Source?

AV1 is already beating HEVC in compression and it's not even finalized yet: https://youtu.be/lzPaldsmJbk?t=2416

Re: HEIF – High Efficiency Image File Format

#54

Post by lorenzhs »

vim_wannabe wrote: post #48
hoschicz wrote: post #35

It's really sad that Apple decided to support the proprietary H.265 and this image format instead of the royalty-free WebP and WebM.

Maybe WebP has some scary patent grant a la Facebook React that made Apple conclude paying MPEG licenses is cheaper than a potential Google suit.

I don't think so, the WebM/WebP patent grant seems to only revoke the licence to use these patents when you claim that Google or someone else is infringing upon your patents by using WebM/WebP: https://www.webmproject.org/license/additional/ (IANAL)

> "If you [...] order or agree to the institution of patent litigation [...] against any entity [...] alleging that any of these implementations of WebM or any code incorporated within any of these implementations of WebM constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, [...] then any patent rights granted to you under this License for these implementations of WebM shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed."

Re: HEIF – High Efficiency Image File Format

#56

Post by floatboth »

fao_ wrote: post #43
masklinn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PNG is a lossless format, it's pretty much pointless for photos. IDK about farbfelt but it seems like a TIFF competitor more than anything else. This is an (significant) improvement over JPEG.

> a lossless format [is] pretty much pointless for photos Why is that? Every edit you make to that photo means that the photo will degrade in quality. I always thought JPEG artifacts and compression lossage was a bad thing for photos, not a good thing?

It's a very good thing when your internet connection is crap.

Re: HEIF – High Efficiency Image File Format

#57

Post by TD-Linux »

amelius wrote: post #16

Why don't we store a url to the decoder inside images and other compressed files for maximum flexibility? I mean, looking at WASM, sandbox technology is sufficiently strong. And performance and availability aren't really an issue either, because for specific cases we can fall back to what we are doing now.

We've already implemented this as part of a web-based AV1 analyzer tool. You provide the URL to both the image and the decoder, which is very convenient because the decoder is constantly changing [1].

Wikipedia also does this to enable video playback on Edge and Safari [2].

The idea to do this within the format itself is quite old. The very early versions of what became Vorbis had a very similar concept, with programmable passes. Matroska once had a field for a link to download the VfW decoder dll (the horror!). It's never really caught on, due to reasons already listed by sibling comments.

[1] https://arewecompressedyet.com/analyzer/?maxFrames=4&decoder...

[2] https://github.com/brion/ogv.js/

Re: HEIF – High Efficiency Image File Format

#58

Post by throwasehasdwi »

Nokia owns several HEVC patents, in fact I think they're currently suing apple about it. This is a veiled attempt to get everyone to use their patented tech so we can relive the mp3/mp4 clusterfuck. You would be a fool to use this for anything.

What's so bad about WebP? It's not the best thing in the universe but it beats JPEG and PNG and has a wide support base. With a shim it has native support in most browsers anyways since WebP is a just a single frame of video. And as a bonus you don't have to worry about someone suing you for royalties down the road.

Re: HEIF – High Efficiency Image File Format

#59

Post by TD-Linux »

The license in the provided implementation seems to be a custom, non-commercial, non-OSI-approved license [1]. It also includes a patent grant, but excludes codec patents, making it even more useless (Nokia can't license other people's HEVC patents, of course). It's based on the LGPL-licensed libde265 library.

[1] https://github.com/nokiatech/heif/blob/master/LICENSE.TXT

Re: HEIF – High Efficiency Image File Format

#60

Post by pornel »

throwasehasdwi wrote: post #58

Nokia owns several HEVC patents, in fact I think they're currently suing apple about it. This is a veiled attempt to get everyone to use their patented tech so we can relive the mp3/mp4 clusterfuck. You would be a fool to use this for anything. What's so bad about WebP? It's not the best thing in the universe but it beats JPEG and PNG and has a wide support base. With a shim it has native support in most browsers any…

> What's so bad about WebP?

WebP is based on VP8, which is now obsolete. It was meant to be a H.264 competitor, a generation behind H.265 and VP9/VP10. WebP compression efficiency is much closer to JPEG than H.265.

This format beats WebP by a margin wider than WebP was smaller than JPEG.

Post reply on HN