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BPG Image format

bellard.org

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Re: BPG Image format

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't there hardware support for JPEG decoding on most mobile devices? If so, I imagine it couldn't compete performance and battery life wise. I remember Mozilla did a software video decoder once in JavaScript. Still, it is quite amazing.

this will definitely need to be hardware-supported for decoding. on my phone, the decode time far exceeds the time it would take to serve up a bigger jpg file. the demos reminded me what browsing on dialup was like. in fact dialup was better cause at least the decoding/loading was progressive/incremental, which doesnt seem to be the case here. i assume it's just the way the decoder is implemented?

Also unfortunately it seems to crash MobilrSafari something fierce when you start to zoom. :-/

Re: BPG Image format

#212

After making a few needed tweaks to get libbpg to compile on Mac OS X, I used the compiled bpgenc binary to convert a test PNG to BPG format. I also converted the PNG to a JPEG for comparison purposes. You can see the results here: http://justinmayer.com/bpg-test/ Size of PNG before conversion: 186K Size after conversion to JPEG: 52K Size after conversion to BPG: 9K I took the liberty of submitting a Homebrew formula…

Before I finished reading your reply, I was going to say "but someone just submitted a formula for libbpg!" Thank you, sir. :)

Re: BPG Image format

#213
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but webp hasn't taken off as much as some would like as a defacto standard. BPG looks good upon cursory inspection. It seems to be more efficient than WebP and supports 42-bit color. It also has .png's features of transparency and lossless compression although I didn't see anything mentioned about animation to replace .gif. Bonus: since it's based on h.265 hardware support will come naturally and should be just a…

Not having animation is a plus to me.

h.265 is the corresponding format for animation.

Re: BPG Image format

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost none of the images from life magazine are studio images. The quality of the images vary greatly depending on the equipment used by the photo-journalist (often viewfinder Leicas not large format Hasselblads). National Geographic has been printed in a format that is approximately have the surface area as Playboy. From a cursory search of NG covers from 1973, the images aren't the same quality as those achievable…

I'm not convinced that other magazines couldn't have provided an image of similar quality, your arguments are rather hand-wavy. The notion that only a person from the same field can have a valid opinion on this is frankly ridiculous. It's plainly ad hominem / argument from authority. I don't care to convince you that we should change the practice of using this picture, but I'm curious to know why you would think we s…

Find one. I've been through a fair amount of old periodicals from the 60s and 70s and I'm at a loss to think of something comparable. A copy of Vogue (est 1892) or W magazine (est. 1972) would probably have comparable images, but would probably not have been readily available at the time to the demographic doing this kind of research.

We should not change it for the reasons I made in several sibling comments: we lose a common point of comparison.

You can dilute it's relevance by providing many alternative reference images for many algorithms and popularized those alternative reference images. No one in the field is going to complain about having more common reference images, but they sure as heck are going to see you as "book burner" if you trying to eliminate the one common image without first providing alternatives. Merely stating there are other lossless images is not sufficient. You need to provide those same images after having been processed with every relevant algorithm someone might need to know.

How about you start off by doing this work for Bellard. Take the Mozilla set, run them through BGP and send the images to Bellard for inclusion on his website. Enrich us. Don't make us poorer.

> The notion that only a person from the same field can have a valid opinion on this is frankly ridiculous. It's plainly ad hominem / argument from authority.

The notion that someone uninvolved can have an opinion and expect others to shoulder the burden of conforming to that opinion is even more ridiculous.

Re: BPG Image format

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the same logic, it would be perfectly okay use goatse image if the guy permitted it, right? If the ability to represent the goatse image were a critical part of the evaluation process for a compression algorithm, then yes. However, we evolved to recognize and respond to subtle features in human faces, not human colons. So, no, goatse would not be an appropriate reference image.

If her face is the only face that is critical to the image compression analysis, yes, you are completely right. I have a hard time understanding the knee jerk reaction to the change and the willingness to maintain the status quo. We have nothing to lose if the image is swapped with one that is less ostracizing --which is something Mozilla did in the past. Why defend it?

People are still up in arms about the last time Mozilla made a swap to be less ostracizing.

Re: BPG Image format

#216
post #17

I notice the container has no ICC profile support. Trivial do add as an extension tag, but should definitely be in the first spec IMO. And if I read this correctly, extension tags are hardcoded as numbers, rather than using a tag name. I don't think that's a good idea.

Is there a situation where 14-bit sRGB isn't enough? There are a lot of weird color matching issues on the web caused by inconsistent application of ICC profiles to PNG images by different browsers / platforms.

Re: BPG Image format

#217
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can actually use HEVC for your content for free, even commercially. Royalties only get involved when distributing encoders & decoders. See page 7 here http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/HEVC/Documents/HEVCweb.p...

Then surely you have an issue, don't you, if you bundle the decoder in JS?

Hmm, that does make me wonder, actually - as far as I know, you can freely distribute source code for encoders & decoders without having to pay any royalties. Binaries / compiled versions are where the royalties come in. And technically, JS code is source code that gets compiled by the browser... so I'm not actually sure where it falls in all this.

Re: BPG Image format

#218
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people that pretend to be offended by things like this, unwittingly infantilizing the people that they are trying to support, do far more to discourage minorities from tech than pictures of women's faces.

I'm curious if you're basing this belief on actual information from the people in question, or just your intuition about what they probably think. Dianne O'Leary, distinguished university professor emerita in UMD's CS department, objects to it: https://www.cs.umd.edu/users/oleary/faculty/node8.html Sunny Bains, senior teaching fellow at UCL, also objects (see page 6): http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/pcs_mirror/m…

I was just reading another article on here about fractal image compression and stumbled across this: http://pointersgonewild.com/2014/01/02/tile-based-image-comp...

written by this woman: https://twitter.com/Love2Code

Maybe you can't generalize the opinions of two people to 50% of the human race?

Re: BPG Image format

#219
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are too sensitive. I'm a hetero male, and I don't find the image 'fun' at all... it's just an image. It doesn't send a message to anyone. If anything, I don't really care for it for image algorithm tests because the palette is fairly flat. No matter how you feel about the image itself, though, there is value in continuing to use it... people are familiar with it, to the point of it becoming almost cliché. This…

The smallish downside of continuing with it may outweigh the very small upside. The image by itself might not be a big deal, but we're trying to disrupt the pattern of women being used only as objects, not perpetuate it.

No, the upside of continuing to use it is to show the politically correct bullies that we aren't afraid, and you aren't going to get everything you want.

Re: BPG Image format

#220
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then surely you have an issue, don't you, if you bundle the decoder in JS?

Hmm, that does make me wonder, actually - as far as I know, you can freely distribute source code for encoders & decoders without having to pay any royalties. Binaries / compiled versions are where the royalties come in. And technically, JS code is source code that gets compiled by the browser... so I'm not actually sure where it falls in all this.

I don't think source code is exempt from patents per se. I think the rule is more like some point in the supply chain has to have a license. It's common to distribute a chip or software library with no license with the assumption that the final product will get a license. But if the source code is the final product it needs a license. IANAL.
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