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BPG Image format

bellard.org

11–20 of 339 posts

Re: BPG Image format

#11

I really dig it, but I'm not yet familiar with BPG. It seems that decoding it would take more processing power, and potentially be slower than JPG. Is this the case? Under the "performance" section, decoding speed was not mentioned.

Yes, it's slower and takes more RAM than JPG. I can see a delay of about a second in my browser. (Edit: I assume my browser is caching the data, but if not, some of that time could be re-downloading the data.)

Re: BPG Image format

#12
post #11

I really dig it, but I'm not yet familiar with BPG. It seems that decoding it would take more processing power, and potentially be slower than JPG. Is this the case? Under the "performance" section, decoding speed was not mentioned.

Yes, it's slower and takes more RAM than JPG. I can see a delay of about a second in my browser. (Edit: I assume my browser is caching the data, but if not, some of that time could be re-downloading the data.)

If the decoder wasn't in JS, that might not be the case. It'd undoubtably be a more efficient native implementation (possibly with hardware support) were it integrated.

Re: BPG Image format

#13
post #11

I really dig it, but I'm not yet familiar with BPG. It seems that decoding it would take more processing power, and potentially be slower than JPG. Is this the case? Under the "performance" section, decoding speed was not mentioned.

Yes, it's slower and takes more RAM than JPG. I can see a delay of about a second in my browser. (Edit: I assume my browser is caching the data, but if not, some of that time could be re-downloading the data.)

[deleted]

Re: BPG Image format

#14
EDIT: I didn't expect this comment to be so popular and feel like I've hijacked the thread a little - sorry. Feel free to continue at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8706850

I would much rather someone revived the Fractal Image format, which is now out of patent. It's very expensive to encode, but that's nowhere near as big a problem as it used to be. It's very fast to decode, very small, and the files are resolution independent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_compression

I was blown away when I encountered it at PC Magazine in the 90s and it seems like it would be very responsive to the needs of today's web.

Re: BPG Image format

#15
post #10

Its purpose is to replace the JPEG image format when quality or file size is an issue. Some of the HEVC algorithms may be protected by patents in some countries There have been some patent disputes over JPEG, but I don't think replacing it with another possibly patented format is a good idea, even if it's technically superior in some ways.

"Most devices already include or will include hardware HEVC support, so we suggest to use it if patents are an issue." I don't know if that suggestion makes much sense, but you missed it in your quote.

What kinds of devices have hardware HEVC acceleration? Phones, PC graphics cards, Blu-ray players?

Re: BPG Image format

#16
Why not use Daala to start from? The overlapping transform probably help especially for still images, and the patent situation is probably at least better.

Re: BPG Image format

#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.

Re: BPG Image format

#18
I was ready to pass by this post with a yawn until I saw where it was coming from: Fabrice Bellard. He's no doubt an absolute freakin' genius. And if anybody knows about image conversion, it's him.

Even the things he does just for fun are impressive. Have you ever booted up Linux inside your browser? http://bellard.org/jslinux/

Re: BPG Image format

#19
I appreciate the historical tradition of using the photo of beautiful young Lena Söderberg as a test image, but it's time to move on. It's fun for us hetero males, but like it or not, this sends a message to young women that they aren't welcome in this field. I wish Fabrice Bellard would have left them out of the demo set.

Having said that, all those demo photos do look good. I was wondering how we were going to see a demo in the browser without built-in support, but leave it to the man who put Linux in the browser to write a decoder in javascript. This is an encouraging project.

Re: BPG Image format

#20
Looking at the Lena pictures demo, the extremely low file size comparison at the top shows just how good .bpg is in that use case. That could make for some much lighter websites when used for less important items like image thumbnails on shopping sites, for example.

When the file size gets larger at the end, it looks like there might be a little loss of detail. Ideally I'd like to compare them by switching back and forth using the original image and the .bpg as Photoshop layers...

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