Image file formats that didn’t make it

Post by dvhh » Thu, Nov 11, 2021, 12:09 AM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #133

mixmastamyk wrote: post #75

Found VRML in there unexpected. But was expecting MNG but didn't find it. Interesting history with that one, a few browsers implemented it but then removed it. Leading to a lot of geek angst. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-image_Network_Graphic...

I was never sure why MNG failed so spectacularly. Eventually it had to be replaced by full up H.264 videos and a lot of places are still using old fashioned animated GIFs because firing up a full fat video codec for a 32x16 animation with a dozen frames is silly. Was it really just the lack of interest from browser makers preventing people from using it?

Post by __david__ » Thu, Nov 11, 2021, 12:16 AM UTC

coldacid wrote: post #97

LocalH wrote: post #35

IFF (or IFF-based formats) is a lot more widely used than some realize, just not usually with ILBM content nowadays. Microsoft RIFF (largely WAV and AVI, although animated Windows cursors also use RIFF), Apple's AIFF audio, Maya uses an IFF variant for raster image data, and even The Sims uses an IFF variant for many of its data files.

Yeah RIFF is essentially IFF with opposite endianness. Regarding IFF usage in The Sims, it's not surprising given that EA designed the format. I believe that SimCity 2000 cities and scenarios are also IFF.

Post by godshatter » Thu, Nov 11, 2021, 12:19 AM UTC

linuxlizard wrote: post #89

godshatter wrote: post #60

Is bmp really dead? It's my go-to file format when playing around with graphic image programming (just stupid hobby stuff). It's easy to pick a format and write one out, and most everything reads it as a format that I've used, even on linux. It can be tricky reading one created by something else, but if you make assumptions based on the header sizes and the fact that you rarely run into one that not a simple 24-bit p…

You should take a look at tiff (also on their list for some reason). I used bmp in my imaging work because it's lossless and uncompressed (I got tired of waiting for 500M png files to open). But tiff is quite simple to understand and is a little more future proof than bmp.

Post by dtgriscom » Thu, Nov 11, 2021, 12:28 AM UTC

LukeBMM wrote: post #76

enriquto wrote: post #7

Tiff is very much not dead. It is likely one of the image formats more widely used today. Terabytes of new tiff images are prodced every hour and distributed by many remote sensing operators. It is a really flexible and robust format also. How else are you going to store a floating-point multispectral image of 8 bands and 50.000 x 50.000 pixels, arranged tile-wise for easy cropping?

AKA: Thousands of Image File Formats. I still remember trying to explain to a previous employer why I needed Debabelizer to create appropriately-striped TIFFs in addition to Photoshop. In hindsight, the me of today would have said then, "I just need it to do this job, which will make you far more money than it costs to buy a single license." The me of then wasn't quite as savvy.

Post by masswerk » Thu, Nov 11, 2021, 12:44 AM UTC

zokier wrote: post #115

kowbell wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always been curious about the distinction between JPEG and JPEG2000. From what I can find online, everyone says that the visual quality is better than JPEG, it just flopped due to slow adoption. Could you elaborate on your claim that it's worse?

Thanks to the power of internet we do not need to speculate; here is a comparison between image formats, JPEG2000 being represented by "OPENJPEG": https://wyohknott.github.io/image-formats-comparison/#sking*... Subjectively I think JPEG2000 is better across the different images, at least at this "medium" size preset.