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FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

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Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#11

Post by gtirloni »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #4

Seems really cool. It seems that the biggest gatekeepers for image formats are Apple and Google because of iPhone/Safari and Android/Chrome. Basically, if you want to be able to easily view the image on a mobile device or on the web, the format needs their blessing.

Well, Chromium is open source so it's open to anyone to implement it.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#13

Post by parvenu74 »

I want to root for it but I think the LGPL license ruins it as long as there are BSD or MIT licenses alternatives that are good enough. Firefox might implement it but I think there’s zero change that Chromium or Safari add support.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#14

Post by tombert »

ronyfadel wrote: post #5

Before Apple/Google/Mozilla adopt in their browsers, I doubt this will get any traction.

I don't think I agree; there are plenty of video and audio formats that exist that were lossless that had traction in the archival and library worlds. Sure, that's not nearly as big of an audience as something like YouTube or Instagram, but it's not nothing.

I could totally see a universe where something like FLIF becoming a de-facto standard in image archiving, particularly for extremely large images. 33% smaller than PNG is a measurably savings in image archiving.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffyuv [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_JPEG [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFV1

=====

EDIT:

I forgot to mention, there are plenty of non-archival formats that get traction even with incomplete browser support. The MKV container format is only partially supported in browsers (with WebM), but it's still a popular format for any kind of home video.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#15

Post by tangm »

It looks like the the creator (Jon Sneyers) has since (2019) made another image format more focused on the lossy compression, FUIF[0], which itself has been subsumed by the JPEG XL format[1]. I hope the "JPEG" branding doesn't make folks think that JPEG XL isn't also a lossless format!

[0] https://github.com/cloudinary/fuif [1] https://jpeg.org/jpegxl/index.html

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#16

Post by CobrastanJorji »

parvenu74 wrote: post #13

I want to root for it but I think the LGPL license ruins it as long as there are BSD or MIT licenses alternatives that are good enough. Firefox might implement it but I think there’s zero change that Chromium or Safari add support.

They could conceivably buy a different license from the author, if the author were to be interested in that, and if the author's the only contributor and didn't derive their code from othe LGPL code, etc, etc.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#17

Post by azinman2 »

Latty wrote: post #6

The section "Works on any kind of image" is really misleading, as it mentions JPEG as a lossy format (alongside JPEG 2000) then says "FLIF beats anything else in all categories." It really needs a giant caveat saying "lossless". I mean, that's still great and impressive, but it clearly doesn't erase the need for a user to switch formats as a lossless format is still not suitable for end users a lot of the time. (It d…

It literally stands for "FLIF - Free Lossless Image Format", and the first sentence is "FLIF is a novel lossless image format which outperforms PNG, lossless WebP, lossless BPG, lossless JPEG2000, and lossless JPEG XR in terms of compression ratio."

Seems like they're doing a pretty decent job at communication it's lossless to me.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#18

Post by MonadIsPronad »

parvenu74 wrote: post #13

I want to root for it but I think the LGPL license ruins it as long as there are BSD or MIT licenses alternatives that are good enough. Firefox might implement it but I think there’s zero change that Chromium or Safari add support.

There's also an Apache 2 licenced decoder mentioned, perhaps with exactly this in mind...
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