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FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

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Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#21

Post by yellowapple »

floatingatoll wrote: post #7
ronyfadel wrote: post #5

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

With the reference encoder licensed under LGPLv3, I doubt any browser team will be able to incorporate this work into their product. They would need to do a full clean room reimplementation simply to study it (since GPLv3 seems unacceptable to them, and LGPLv3 can’t coexist with GPLv2, and so forth and so on). It’s really unfortunate that the FLIF team chose such a restrictive license :( EDIT: Their reference JS poly…

The decoder-only version of the reference implementation (libflif_dec) uses the Apache 2.0 license (specifically for this reason, I'd assume). Browsers shouldn't need to encode FLIF images very often, so decoder-only would be fine for that use case.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#24

Post by kragen »

azinman2 wrote: post #17
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.

It would be reasonable to interpret the shorter boast as making the very surprising claim that it beats anything else, including lossy JPEG, in all categories of performance, including compression ratio. As it turns out, they don't intend to claim that, because it's not true. It's probably impossible for a lossless file format to do that, even for commonly occurring images. (It's certainly possible for a lossless image format to do that for images that have a lot of redundancy in a form that JPEG isn't sophisticated enough to recognize.)

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#25

Post by not2b »

MonadIsPronad wrote: post #18
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...

Only the encoder is LGPL, the decoder is Apache, web browsers only need a decoder.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#26

Post by ehsankia »

azinman2 wrote: post #17
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.

If we're going to switch to a new format, it would preferably support and be good at everything, including animation, lossy, alpha, metadata and color profiles.

What the first graph shows me is that this format is slightly better than WebP in one aspect, ignoring half the other features of it. Considering WebP is already far more ahead in terms of adoption, I'm happy sticking with that instead. It's natively supported in most browser and many graphics softwares, which is the real uphill battle for a new file format.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#28

Post by hug »

pier25 wrote: post #22

They have a polyfill for browsers: https://github.com/UprootLabs/poly-flif It weights 77kB gzipped which is a no-no in my book. Jesus, my current Mithril SPA weights 37kB gzipped. Not the JS bundle, the complete application.

While weight is a factor in professional car racing, and while I've built a go-kart that is significantly lighter in weight than a professional racing car, it is not a particularly impressive achievement that I have managed to do so, and I wouldn't think to criticize a race team for the weight of their vehicle.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#29

Post by mindslight »

I use this to store archives of scanned documents. The last thing I want is to scan something only to later find some subtle image artifact corruption (remember that case of copy machines modifying numbers by swapping glyphs?). I store checksums and a static flif binary along with the archive. It's definitely overkill, but a huge win compared to stacks of paper sitting around.

My intuition was informed by choosing FLAC for my music collection ~15 years ago, and that working out fantastically. If a better format does come along, or if I change my mind, I can always transcode.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#30

Post by pnako »

tangm wrote: post #15

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

JPEG XL is either lossy compression for large pictures, or something named by people who suck at branding.
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