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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

#141

Post by ElectricalUnion »

chriscjcj wrote: post #110
zwieback wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was my reaction. To be fair author says: "Of the formats listed here, TIFF is probably the one most likely to still be in wide use, but it has evolved into a more specialized format for professionals, in comparison to something like JPG."

TIFFs are uncompressed or compressed with zip or lzw which is lossless. JPEGs are lossy and can't possibly be lossless. Pitting one as an alternative to the other is apples an oranges. When I read that sentence you quoted, I figured that the author is either lacking knowledge on the topic they're blogging about or they are trolling.

> JPEGs are lossy and can't possibly be lossless.

https://jpeg.org/jpegxl/

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#143

Post by spijdar »

OnlyMortal wrote: post #58
kitsunesoba wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For quite some time TIFF was the default format for screenshots on OS X, which was probably one of its more prominent uses by the general public. During that period it was also pretty common for developers to use TIFF for application assets like toolbar icons and splash screens. At some point that all shifted over to PNG, but macOS support for TIFF remains good to this day.

It’s because TIFF and Postscript are friends. Source: NeXTStep ;-)

I'll never pass up the opportunity to add random NeXT trivia -- Grab.app is one of several applications that came from NeXTSTEP/OpenSTEP with relatively few modifications, along with Preview.app, Terminal.app, TextEdit.app, Chess.app, and probably many others.

For anyone with curiosity and time to burn, comparing early OS X with NeXT/OpenSTEP in VMs is fun, just to see what changed and what stayed. Some parts are extremely different, while some software seemed to be copy-pasted over, while others clearly had a lot of polish put into them for the consumer market. Fun times!

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#144

Post by klodolph »

jfrunyon wrote: post #124
klodolph wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably because of how simple the format can be, with basically a header and footer tacked on to some RGBA data. Surprisingly, with PNG, the deflate compression can slow you down, depending on what you are doing with the data. Saving a little bit of IO when you're accessing local data can turn out to be a losing proposition. TGA makes it easier to just shove pixels around, from program to program. TGA has all…

I believe PNG supports uncompressed files, usually with a compression level = 0.

The data is still a Deflate stream, it's just that the deflate stream will be a series of literal blocks. The idea behind "uncompressed" is that you can just copy the data into memory, and level = 0 does not achieve that (you still have to decode the deflate stream).

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#145

Post by yread »

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?

Don't forget having multiple images in one file - 200.000x200.000 pixel main tiled, pyramidal jpeg or jp2 encoded image, thumbnail, label, overview and barcode. Next to the standardized metadata like resolution and vendor-specific xml with descriptions of channels, wavelengths, antibodies and complete provenance. With libtiff and libtiff-tools to help you make sense of it.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#146

Post by Zardoz84 »

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?

TIFF it's a recommended format for digitalised documents by the American library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/stillimg.html

also, DNG format (a raw format) it's a derivated from TIFF.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#147

Post by ElectricalUnion »

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…

> dedicated hardware for sound decompression

Do they? Most of "modern audio" is just software decoding/mixing to a pretty not-smart-Digital-to-Analog Converter.

My educated guess is that most compressed audio formats are optimized for size, not for low latency recording/playback.

Also one of the reasons why Opus is so good and is replacing lots of older formats.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#148

Post by tadbit »

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?

TIFF is still used in forensics/evidence processing by law enforcement agencies world-wide.

Seeing it on this list makes me think the author didn't dig very deep when writing this article.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#149

Post by acdha »

jandrese wrote: post #129
acdha wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JPEG-2000 was held back by intellectual property restrictions: patents but also the fact that the spec cost $1,500. A lot of the parties involved appeared to think that the technical merits made adoption inevitable and so they didn't spend time making it appealing with things like a test suite or high-quality open source implementation. That had several impacts which scarred a lot of people I've worked with: 1. The c…

The patent situation was exacerbated by the fact that JPEG2000 started getting pushed right about the time the GIF patent situation blew up so everybody was reluctant have a repeat disaster. Add in the fact that JPEG2000 showed at best a marginal improvement over JPEG and it's not hard to just stick with the proven technology. Having no good reference implementation is just a nail in the coffin.

I would describe JPEG-2000 as more than a marginal improvement over JPEG: it's one format which supports lossless and lossy compression, it compresses a good bit better and the artifacts are less visually distracting, has better progressive streaming, and full support for variable bit depth and colorspaces.

If you look at it technically, it'll win on just about every point. Unfortunately for the standard, most of the people involved assumed that was enough to make adoption inevitable. I think it could have gone down a different path if, say, someone had released a high-quality open source version or worked with e.g. Netscape/Mozilla to integrate it into web browsers but that would have basically meant scaling back the older dream of making a profitable business around a single component like an image codec.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#150

Post by TylerGlaiel »

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…

the other reason game devs use ogg vorbis over mp3 is cause ogg vorbis supports gapless looping and mp3 doesn't
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