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Image file formats that didn’t make it

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Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#91

Post by rwmj »

enriquto wrote: post #7

Tiff is very much not dead. It is likely one of the image formats more widely used today. Terabytes of new tiff images are prodced every hour and distributed by many remote sensing operators. It is a really flexible and robust format also. How else are you going to store a floating-point multispectral image of 8 bands and 50.000 x 50.000 pixels, arranged tile-wise for easy cropping?

Yes, TIFF was (probably still is) the standard for capturing X-ray detector images with tons of channels, weird numbers of bits per channel, and custom metadata. I actually wrote a TIFF decoder in my first job. It is a crazy format though - "bi-endian" in that you have a choice of endianness.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#92

Post by selfhoster11 »

godshatter wrote: post #60

Is bmp really dead? It's my go-to file format when playing around with graphic image programming (just stupid hobby stuff). It's easy to pick a format and write one out, and most everything reads it as a format that I've used, even on linux. It can be tricky reading one created by something else, but if you make assumptions based on the header sizes and the fact that you rarely run into one that not a simple 24-bit p…

It's as dead as you want it to be. IMO, I prefer it when I have to deal with lossless uncompressed images because it's familiar to users of old versions of Windows.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#93

Post by Isthatablackgsd »

WorldMaker wrote: post #64
Isthatablackgsd wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why some games have uncompressed audio files which made the game size ballooned up. If the game have so much audio on, it would be best to use uncompressed audio as CPU don't have to spend extra resources to decode bunch of audio files at the same time when the games is asking for it.

This is a small pet peeve of mine. Even though PCs have mostly lost dedicated "sound cards" they still have dedicated hardware for sound decompression in their SoC packages. The big reason I think games often think they need so much uncompressed audio has not as much to do with hardware support as much as it is that games and general consumers "forked" on different compression paths in audio. Most consumer audio is M…

Even though CPU have hardware support for decoding, there are factors that can affect how much the computer handles it.

The games have to deal with multiple layers of audios at the same time. So imagine one sound file have the dialogue for that specific scene, other sound file have the ambient music to compliment the surrounding, other file have sound effects, etc. So the games have to handle maybe 10 audio files at the same time which can put the strain on the CPU since it need to handle the decoding for compressed format. When that occurs, it eats up the CPU resources when it should be allocated for other stuff. Also don't forget some game have 5.1, 7.1, Dolby variants, etc which can be taxing on the CPU if it have to process multiple compressed audio at the same time.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#95

Post by a_e_k »

royjacobs wrote: post #59
ahartmetz wrote: post #16

JPEG2000 is a big one that seems to be missing. It is used in medical imaging or something, because laws? But its visual quality is worse than old JPEG, despite a PSNR advantage. Apparently, compression researchers used to think that people care about PSNR.

It also used to form the basis for Redcode, the file format used by RED digital cinema cameras. Not sure if the current version is still based on JPEG2000 though.

AFAIK, digital cinema packages (DCP) used for shipping movies to theaters and showing them on digital projectors are still based on JPEG2000 image sequences.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#96

Post by ksec »

yboris wrote: post #88
ksec wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still waiting for browser and industry wide support. So far no one seems to care much.

Not true: https://caniuse.com/?search=jxl It's in Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Opera behind flags - works great!

It is behind a flag, with no time table when it will be officially supported. And no company ( apart from Facebook ) came up and said we will use it as long as browser supports it. Most are still in the AVIF camp.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#97

Post by coldacid »

LocalH wrote: post #35

IFF (or IFF-based formats) is a lot more widely used than some realize, just not usually with ILBM content nowadays. Microsoft RIFF (largely WAV and AVI, although animated Windows cursors also use RIFF), Apple's AIFF audio, Maya uses an IFF variant for raster image data, and even The Sims uses an IFF variant for many of its data files.

Yeah RIFF is essentially IFF with opposite endianness.

Regarding IFF usage in The Sims, it's not surprising given that EA designed the format. I believe that SimCity 2000 cities and scenarios are also IFF.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#98

Post by coldacid »

mark-r wrote: post #78
Const-me wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree about TGA, it is trivially easy to write. Example in C# for grayscale version, a single page of code: https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac/blob/1.2/VrmacInterop/Util... BMP is more complicated, unfortunately. The header structure is more complex. And then there’s a requirement for rows to be 4-bytes aligned, might need to insert padding bytes between the rows.

The code for BMP isn't very complicated, the hard part is knowing all the rules and corner cases. Like the 4-byte alignment you mentioned, or the fact that the rows are in reverse order of what you'd expect (bottom up).

I think the row order in BMP is OS/2 related. Windows, X, etc. all put 0,0 in the top-left corner, but OS/2 puts it in the bottom-left instead.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#99

Post by Const-me »

WorldMaker wrote: post #48
handrous wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think bitmaps are often used in 2d games for level definition or various other sorts of mapping (height, for 2.5d games, et c.)

Bitmap is the easiest image file format in the world to read/write and the easiest and sometimes fastest to shoot over to any video device in the history of computing. Almost every game making tutorial going back to the 80s has "how to read/write" bitmaps usually in it somewhere. Even 3D games will sometimes use them in a lot of odd places because it was faster/easier/took fewer cycles to include an uncompressed or s…

> modern GPUs often support image decompression directly for certain texture file formats

That works great for compressed textures like DDS or ASTC.

Unfortunately, the hardware decoders for proper codecs like jpeg or h.264 typically come with APIs prohibitively complicated to use, unless the app is a video player and needs to consume these APIs anyway, despite the complexity.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#100

Post by a_e_k »

ksec wrote: post #85
mixmastamyk wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about webp, avif, and the like?

WebP hasn't shown any significant advantage in real world test, and AVIF only wins in low bpp usage with a huge trade off on encode and decode speed. It is listed in the JPEG XL comparison table.

The interesting thing to me is that compared to WebP and AVIF, JPEG XL is the only one that isn't just largely based on a video codec's I-frame compression.
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