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What’s the best lossless image format?

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Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#151

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.

One lossless png (a screenshot) was converted to (default web quality, which is lossy) webp, and visually it was identical. Original png was 151k, webp was 23k. Converting it to a jpg results in a size of 66k (equivalent quality to the webp).

So in this case webp was a third of the size of a jpg. Typically, webp will be about 30-50% smaller than an equivalent jpg, which is a pretty significant amount.

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#152

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> 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?

> I personally doubt it very much.

It might help if you specified exactly what it is you doubt...

It's a simple fact that Basic English has a shorter wordlist than Esperanto, simple rules, and being based on English it omits things like gender for objects.

While perhaps exaggerated, the claim was: "it would take seven years to learn English, seven months for Esperanto, and seven weeks for Basic English."

Some references to start with:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Criticism

https://englishharmony.com/english-is-easy/

https://academickids.com/encyclopedia/index.php/Basic_Englis...

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#153

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Apple didn't support WebP for the longest time. A bunch of fairly major sites started using them. While they worked in the browser, when downloading the image macOS couldn't open it. The same went for the video format. I just tried downloading a couple and they seem to work now, but I've grown to hate WebP. Even if they open today, I likely won't keep anything saved as WebP, because I won't trust it will work down th…

Apple could force the industry forward if they added Opus, FLAC, and JPEG XL support everywhere. Ok, they’re often the ones holding everyone else back in these areas.

Steve Jobs was asked a question related to this many years ago [1]. Older Jobs was asked as well [2].

The trouble is that you may want Opus, FLAC, and JPEG XL, but someone else wants a different set, and someone else wants yet a different set... then in 3 years everyone changes their mind. There is value to some stability and consistency to these file formats so our media is durable and broadly supported over time.

I'm not sure Apple is the only one holding this stuff back. I just checked out a JPEG XL site [3] and it only shows partial support and it's hidden behind a feature flag. As long as this is the current state of things, Apple isn't holding back anything. It's simply not ready for prime time.

I get the desire for open source standards used for media, but they never seem to be as broadly supported, and for your average user, that's all they care about. "Can I view my image? Can I listen to my music?" If the answer is no, they don't care about anything else. Most users won't know if they are looking at a PNG or JPEG XL, or listing to an m4a file vs Opus.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48j493tfO-o [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmRNIGqzuRI [3] https://jpegxl.io/#tutorials

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#154
post #104

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So if you are on linux, practically every app that deals with images will work. On windows and mac, it's probably less likely.

"So if you are on linux, practically every app that deals with images will work." Linux has way more than 9 apps that deal with images. So if you are on linux, practically every app that deals with images will NOT work with JPEG XL.

Their point was that most Linux apps (and a lot of Windows/macOS apps, actually) that deal with images with do so via one of the above libraries, and therefore will handle JPEG XL without even knowing what it is.

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> I personally doubt it very much. It might help if you specified exactly what it is you doubt... It's a simple fact that Basic English has a shorter wordlist than Esperanto, simple rules, and being based on English it omits things like gender for objects. While perhaps exaggerated, the claim was: "it would take seven years to learn English, seven months for Esperanto, and seven weeks for Basic English." Some referen…

The first doubt was around the fact that a language with the pronounciation background coming out of the English language will be "easier" to learn than a strictly phonetic one.

Just looking over the list of words in your last link, I'm pretty sure that any number of them would trip someone that is a blank slate. For example: "who", "wheel" and "humour" are vastly inconsistent with regards to how they sound. Having to learn these idiosyncrasies, even for 900 words, would be - in my opinion - more difficult than the basic rules of Esperanto (and Ido, which seems even simpler).

I would imagine that coupled with a phonetic transliteration of the common sounds it would be easier but then the language would probably become a different thing all together.

I hope that clarifies a bit.

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#156
post #61

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Quite, and encoding speed, which is included, seems almost irrelevant

Encoding speed can be very important, especially if you are seeking to decode the resulting image as quickly as possible at all times. Certain image formats are wildly better real-time containers than others. Encoding speed is irrelevant unless it's very low or very high. Most people are thinking amortize the decode against the encode and don't even consider what would happen if you took it into the other extreme. Di…

What do you think about MJPEG versus RFB (the VNC protocol)? I know that in modern VNC implementations, at least unofficial ones, JPEG is one of the available encodings. Still, IIUC, the big difference is that with MJPEG, the encoder sends a complete JPEG image for each frame, while this doesn't need to be the case with RFB.

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#157

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> 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…

Can you share any links here of your tool?

Sorry, I haven't published it. At this point it (mostly) "works for me" but there are a bunch of things that don't (yet) and there are a bunch of caveats and problems.

Also, it's really not that interesting of a project as such, but it was/is interesting for me anyway in the sense that I now know more about image processing and X11 ("outdated", allegedly, but works fine for me, so whatever).

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#158

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Can I ask why you chose PNG for your archive format?

It's lossless, offers compression, works with 16-bit images, and is well supported in a lot of software on all sorts of platforms.

Interesting, thanks. I'd heard of PNG being used for this before and thought people had lost the plot.

For context I started a neg scanning project a few years ago, ~150 rolls on an epson v850 (flatbed), and stuck with the default compressed tif after some surface research. There is little chance I would consider another processing step .. unless it was batched on a server somewhere! Very painstaking process, which has been on indefinite hold for a small while now (waiting for the AI to catch up).

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#159

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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…

> You could make a similar case for audio It wasn't really my intention to "make a case"; just an observation/lament/complaint.

Oops, that was just a figure of speech, I didn't mean anything by it!

Re: What’s the best lossless image format?

#160

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How many megabytes per second is your scanner feeding you? I'm very surprised that encoding a PNG is slower than scanning.

It's not slower than scanning, but I still spend a significant amount of time waiting for the maximum compression PNG encoding to complete.

Don't use maximum compression in this use case. Maximum (Zopfli-based?) is for those who will serve the image hundred times over the Internet while users are waiting for it. It is not cost effective or practical for storage only use.
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