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What’s the best lossless image format?

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Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#111
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could make a similar case for audio. GP described Opus as "the definitive codec for lossy compression", which made me do a bit of a double take. Opus is absolutely the technically superior audio format, but when you want to give users a file you'll be sure they can play, you give them an MP3. I expect JPEG and PNG to become for images what MP3 is today. And I expect H.264 to become that for video. These formats a…

> DVORAK is better than QWERTY Not if you're a programmer, punctuation, which is much more frequent in programming languages than english, is a lot harder to type. I've heard colemak is better for developers, but as a vim user, relearning touch typing AND my vim muscle memory doesn't appeal to me, so i haven't given it a serious try.

In vim wouldn’t you just remap everything so that the physical keys stay the same in normal mode, and only use an alternative layout in insert mode?

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#113
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DVORAK is better than QWERTY Not if you're a programmer, punctuation, which is much more frequent in programming languages than english, is a lot harder to type. I've heard colemak is better for developers, but as a vim user, relearning touch typing AND my vim muscle memory doesn't appeal to me, so i haven't given it a serious try.

In vim wouldn’t you just remap everything so that the physical keys stay the same in normal mode, and only use an alternative layout in insert mode?

There's too much cognitive overhead if you do this. For example, to change a word we use `ciw`, which roughly means "Change Inner Word" as a mnemonic. There are quite a lot of similar keys with mnemonics, which would prolly make no sense if you keep the QWERTY keypresses on a Dvorak layout.

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to check your pagespeed insights to verify that. I noticed that our pagespeed score was very poor (due to google using new methods to calculate those scores). Adding webp versions of images reduced the size of those images significantly, and brought our pagespeed scores back to more reasonable values in google's eyes.

It’s unlikely that WebP was what helped there, but rather more lossy encoding (presuming it was JPEGs you were replacing). Yes, WebP is smaller for a given perception quality level, but it’s typically not that much smaller; you could have achieved results almost as good by reencoding to the same perception quality as you used on the WebPs but still as JPEGs.

JPEG doesn't support transparency.

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#115

JPEG XL is the standard to beat them all. Like how Opus became the definitive codec for lossy compression for the web. JPEG XL covers nearly every use case for images, even replacing GIFs with it's animation support. Existing JPEGs can also be re-encoded losslessly into JPEG XL format/data structure and get significant file size savings. This backwards compatiability is very important in transitioning to web to JPEG…

I used to think this, but I've lost confidence over the last year. I literally work on the software that generates jpg files on Googles Pixel phones, and there seems to be no realistic path to JPEG XL adoption within the next 5 years.

Why not? What’s stopping the next Pixel phone producing JPEG XL images the same way the iPhone switched to HEIC images a few years back?

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#116
post #36

The best lossless format is the one you can decode back to the original image. When evaluating them, there is an implicit assumption that the decode step will happen a short time later, but that's not always true. Will there be JPEG XL decoders commonly available in 40 years? Will the code even compile then? As a thought experiment, try to find the lossless encodings from 40 years ago and see if they can be faithfull…

This seems excessively handwringing about code rot. TIFF was introduced 35 years ago and still well supported. JPEG2000 didn't become super widespread, but is still used in many places. Smart passports encode your passport photo in JPEG2000 for example.

The question isn’t whether any format from 35 years ago is still feasible to decode. The question is whether every format from back then is.

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#117
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think this, but I've lost confidence over the last year. I literally work on the software that generates jpg files on Googles Pixel phones, and there seems to be no realistic path to JPEG XL adoption within the next 5 years.

Why not? What’s stopping the next Pixel phone producing JPEG XL images the same way the iPhone switched to HEIC images a few years back?

To first approximation, nothing. And it's possible that we will at some point in the near future. The problem is consuming it. You won't be able to view the photo on device until Android adds it, or until the gallery and camera apps add custom software decoders. You won't be able to share with anybody until Facebook/Whatsapp/etc add support. you won't be able to view online until the browsers add support....

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Without a doubt 5 years now JPEG XL will become like Opus and set the standard for next generation image formats. I wrote a little X11 screenshot tool last year; one of the reasons I wrote it is because I wanted to save images as WebP rather than PNG that most tools use, since it's quite a bit smaller. Not that I'm running out of disk space, but it just seemed nice; one of those "no, it's not really needed but it's…

You could make a similar case for audio. GP described Opus as "the definitive codec for lossy compression", which made me do a bit of a double take. Opus is absolutely the technically superior audio format, but when you want to give users a file you'll be sure they can play, you give them an MP3. I expect JPEG and PNG to become for images what MP3 is today. And I expect H.264 to become that for video. These formats a…

> Itanium was better than AMD64

I thought the consensus was that Itanium turned out to be a significant mistake and represented a misestimate of how we could utilise it in software?

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could make a similar case for audio. GP described Opus as "the definitive codec for lossy compression", which made me do a bit of a double take. Opus is absolutely the technically superior audio format, but when you want to give users a file you'll be sure they can play, you give them an MP3. I expect JPEG and PNG to become for images what MP3 is today. And I expect H.264 to become that for video. These formats a…

> Itanium was better than AMD64, No, AMD64 is far superior, Itanium's benefits never materialized. Any BOTH offer backwards compatibility, anyhow. > DVORAK is better than QWERTY, Not by enough to matter except in extreme circumstances. I say this as a Dvorak typist. > I'm sure Esperanto is lightyears ahead of the monstrosity that is English. It's not. It is needlessly complicated. "Basic," "Simple," or "Technical" En…

> It's not. It is needlessly complicated. "Basic," "Simple," or "Technical" English (which came along a few years after Esperanto) is far simpler and quicker to learn.

I'm sure it's easy to say that when you are already an English speaker. I personally doubt it very much. Is there some data maybe that supports this point of view?

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