I guess I'm old because I've written loaders and savers for at least 3 of those formats listed there. Granted it was when I was still learning, but many of those formats are pretty simple to code up a good first approximation loader for. I don't know if I'd want to try and write a loader for JPEG or PNG these dats for example.
Image file formats that didn’t make it
171–180 of 210 posts
Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ext…
Preview existed in OpenStep?
Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
But compression time were atrocious and decoder were not as fast as the jpeg one (at the time). Marginal support from tool/browser didn't help boost its popularity, and patent situation as pointed in parent comment just shut the coffin on this otherwise ok format. At the time vanilla jpeg had compression artifact and had worst compression rate, but was good enough at the time, even now because of its ubiquity the "su…
Exactly: it seems like a classic “Worse is better” situation where JPEG 2000 is basically better across the board on features but none of that mattered as much as being widespread and fast enough. Something like TIFF or BMP wouldn't have been able to do the same since the file sizes are so much larger that they'd have had a noticeable impact on usability but JPEG was far over the “good enough” bar for most users.
Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it
#174Found VRML in there unexpected. But was expecting MNG but didn't find it. Interesting history with that one, a few browsers implemented it but then removed it. Leading to a lot of geek angst. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-image_Network_Graphic...
I was never sure why MNG failed so spectacularly. Eventually it had to be replaced by full up H.264 videos and a lot of places are still using old fashioned animated GIFs because firing up a full fat video codec for a 32x16 animation with a dozen frames is silly. Was it really just the lack of interest from browser makers preventing people from using it?
My understanding is that the video codecs are pretty clearly ahead for lossy compression, even for small numbers of frames. Image codecs got stuck in the jpg/gif/png local maximum, hence why a lot of the new image codecs (webp, heif, avif) are conceptually "one frame of a video codec" (vp9, h265 and av1 respectively)
Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it
#175Earlier 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.
Interesting, most websites that convert user media to WebP load quite fast for me whereas conversions to JPEG are fast but still a bit slower/lower quality in my experience.
WebP suffers from lack of support in outdated browsers, but that's the only problem I've found with it. AVIF is kind of a silly format, but for some use cases it works quite well.
JPEG XL has very little tool support, isn't (as) free as the alternatives and browser support is practically non-existent. Nobody wants to adopt the format either, because the JPEG group made the same problem Nintendo made when naming the Wii U: JPEG XL sounds like a JPEG file with something special going on inside, while in fact it's actually a completely new format.
Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it
#176In a summer tech program for pre-college high school tech-interested//inclined students, my group of three created four different VRML world-spaces. We each made our own, and I made the "gateway" world-space where you would enter a Parthenon-like structure with three hyperlink objects inside which you could click on to travel to each of the other places. Each place had a similar hyperlink object to get back to the Pa…
VRML Sourcebook [0]. I did a similar little project in VRML. I took the general organization of my homepage and VRMLized it. Authoring it was such a pain in the ass. I loved the concepts behind VRML, and still do. Unfortunately all of the implementations around it were terrible. When it was in vogue PCs weren't powerful enough to handle anything but the most trivial models. Dial-up was entirely insufficient to delive…
> I loved the concepts behind VRML, and still do. Unfortunately all of the implementations around it were terrible.
Being ~18 years away and therefore memory is skewed, may I ask regarding how the implementations were terrible? Honest question.
Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it
#177Earlier 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…
TGA is easier because the rows go top-to-bottom, you don't have the RIFF header, and you don't have to pad each row to 4 bytes. I still copy and paste a little TGA encoder into my graphics code when I need to dump something out for debugging.
Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it
#178ICO? Window's icon format. IIRC it was really two images baked into a single file; one a colour bitmap and another mask that's used for transparency.
Don't a lot of favicons still use that format?
Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
But compression time were atrocious and decoder were not as fast as the jpeg one (at the time). Marginal support from tool/browser didn't help boost its popularity, and patent situation as pointed in parent comment just shut the coffin on this otherwise ok format. At the time vanilla jpeg had compression artifact and had worst compression rate, but was good enough at the time, even now because of its ubiquity the "su…
Exactly: it seems like a classic “Worse is better” situation where JPEG 2000 is basically better across the board on features but none of that mattered as much as being widespread and fast enough. Something like TIFF or BMP wouldn't have been able to do the same since the file sizes are so much larger that they'd have had a noticeable impact on usability but JPEG was far over the “good enough” bar for most users.
I think facebook even had a backlash when it tried to switch to webp for serving image
Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it
#180Tiff 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?
AKA: Thousands of Image File Formats. I still remember trying to explain to a previous employer why I needed Debabelizer to create appropriately-striped TIFFs in addition to Photoshop. In hindsight, the me of today would have said then, "I just need it to do this job, which will make you far more money than it costs to buy a single license." The me of then wasn't quite as savvy.
I regularly outline how much engineering time could be saved with some minor capital expenses. They choose the longer and more expensive route every time.