Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

flif.info

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 254 posts

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#71

Post by kalleboo »

jjcm wrote: post #47

Always cool to see new visual compression libraries hit the scene. That said I think the hardest part isn't the math of it, but the adoption of it. Likely the format with the best chance of overthrowing the jpg/gif/png incumbents is AVIF. Since it's based on AV1, you'd get hardware acceleration for decoding/encoding once it starts becoming a standard, and browser support will be trivial to add once AV1 has wide suppo…

What it will take for something to overthrow JPEG is for both Google and Apple to adopt it. If Android, Chrome, iOS, macOS and Safari all support it (and the phones shoot in it natively like the iPhone does with HEIF right now), it will take over.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#72

Post by modeless »

BurningCycles wrote: post #55
jjcm wrote: post #47

Always cool to see new visual compression libraries hit the scene. That said I think the hardest part isn't the math of it, but the adoption of it. Likely the format with the best chance of overthrowing the jpg/gif/png incumbents is AVIF. Since it's based on AV1, you'd get hardware acceleration for decoding/encoding once it starts becoming a standard, and browser support will be trivial to add once AV1 has wide suppo…

>Likely the format with the best chance of overthrowing the jpg/gif/png incumbents is AVIF I used to think the same as well, however I now think Jpeg XL is poised to be the 'winner' among next gen image codecs. It's royalty free, great lossy and lossless compression which is said to beat the competition, as well as providing a perfect upgrade path for existing jpeg's as it can losslessly recompress them into the jpeg…

Does it have the feature where the file can be truncated to any size to form its own thumbnail? That would be an incredibly useful feature in so many applications.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#73

Post by pgcj_poster »

0xff00ffee wrote: post #70

Isn't making it LGPL a problem? That means anything that touches it becomes LGPL, right?

Firstly, it's not a "problem" when code is released under the GPL. In many cases this is the best way to protect user freedom.

Secondly, this is the Lesser GPL, which means that only modifications to the FLIF implementation itself have to be free. It can still be linked in proprietary programs as long as they don't make any modifications.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#74

Post by monktastic1 »

kragen wrote: post #24
azinman2 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ima…

Surely nobody could interpret this as beating an arbitrarily lossy format. I could just erase the entire input, after all. One would have to incorporate quality into the metric. Because of that, it seems natural to assume they mean lossless.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#75

Post by Scaevolus »

modeless wrote: post #72
BurningCycles wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Likely the format with the best chance of overthrowing the jpg/gif/png incumbents is AVIF I used to think the same as well, however I now think Jpeg XL is poised to be the 'winner' among next gen image codecs. It's royalty free, great lossy and lossless compression which is said to beat the competition, as well as providing a perfect upgrade path for existing jpeg's as it can losslessly recompress them into the jpeg…

Does it have the feature where the file can be truncated to any size to form its own thumbnail? That would be an incredibly useful feature in so many applications.

It has a progressive mode, but not as aggressive of one as FLIF.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#76

Post by ralusek »

modeless wrote: post #72
BurningCycles wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Likely the format with the best chance of overthrowing the jpg/gif/png incumbents is AVIF I used to think the same as well, however I now think Jpeg XL is poised to be the 'winner' among next gen image codecs. It's royalty free, great lossy and lossless compression which is said to beat the competition, as well as providing a perfect upgrade path for existing jpeg's as it can losslessly recompress them into the jpeg…

Does it have the feature where the file can be truncated to any size to form its own thumbnail? That would be an incredibly useful feature in so many applications.

Surely not any size. It'd have to be squares or something for that to make any sense, right?

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#77

Post by PetahNZ »

userbinator wrote: post #59

I wonder how it compares with simply LZMA'ing (i.e. 7zip) a BMP. In my experience that has always been significantly smaller than PNG (which is itself a low bar --- deflate/zlib is a simple LZ+Huffman variant which is nowhere near the top of general-purpose lossless compression algorithms.) Along the same lines, I suspect BMP+LZMA would likely be beaten by BMP+PPM or BMP+PAQ, the current extreme in general-purpose co…

Do you have any examples of zipped bmp's compared to png. Seem strange if that was indeed better.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#78

Post by BurningCycles »

mceachen wrote: post #68
BurningCycles wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Likely the format with the best chance of overthrowing the jpg/gif/png incumbents is AVIF I used to think the same as well, however I now think Jpeg XL is poised to be the 'winner' among next gen image codecs. It's royalty free, great lossy and lossless compression which is said to beat the competition, as well as providing a perfect upgrade path for existing jpeg's as it can losslessly recompress them into the jpeg…

Interesting. Where have you seen that adoption will be swifter with JPEG XL instead of, say, AV1/AVIF? (Speaking as someone who's seen several open, licensing-unencumbered image/video/audio formats fail to get traction with a majority of browsers).

>Interesting. Where have you seen that adoption will be swifter with JPEG XL instead of, say, AV1/AVIF?

Well, it's not finalized as of yet (though it is imminent), so rate of adoption is just pure guesswork at this stage. However, things I deem necessary for a new image codec to become the next 'de facto' standard are:

royalty free

major improvements over the current de facto standards

Both AVIF and Jpeg XL tick these boxes, however Jpeg XL has another strong feature which is that it offers a lossless upgrade path for existing jpeg's with significantly improved compression as a bonus.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#79

Post by Scaevolus »

mceachen wrote: post #68
BurningCycles wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Likely the format with the best chance of overthrowing the jpg/gif/png incumbents is AVIF I used to think the same as well, however I now think Jpeg XL is poised to be the 'winner' among next gen image codecs. It's royalty free, great lossy and lossless compression which is said to beat the competition, as well as providing a perfect upgrade path for existing jpeg's as it can losslessly recompress them into the jpeg…

Interesting. Where have you seen that adoption will be swifter with JPEG XL instead of, say, AV1/AVIF? (Speaking as someone who's seen several open, licensing-unencumbered image/video/audio formats fail to get traction with a majority of browsers).

This presentation covers why AVIF isn't a great replacement for JPEG-- mostly that it's slow, complicated, and lacks a progressive mode.

https://www.slideshare.net/cloudinarymarketing/imagecon-2019...

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#80

Post by floatingatoll »

yarrel wrote: post #48
floatingatoll wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's FUD time! The LGPL is hardly "restrictive". If you aren't modifying the code, and for a codec if you are I have questions, then you've nothing to worry about. Regarding license compatibility, which actually existing browser are you worried about the licensing terms of?

Safari is by Apple, who seems to have decided to deprecate and replace every open source component that relicenses as v3 (such as OpenSSL and bash); their chances of allowing their team to come into contact with this work would be particularly poor as a result, not to mention their competing HEIF product.

Firefox is by Mozilla, and the browser team ships code under MPL2 (afaik) which permits dual-licensing with GPL2 - but not, as far as I can work out personally, either variant of GPLv3; is MPL2 permissible to dual-license with LGPLv3, or would they be required not to implement an encoder due to incompatibility? (Mozilla seems invested in the AV1 codec, so it’s safe to assume they would be interested in a lossless frame encoder with higher efficiency than lossy options.)

Chromium seems to accept any mix of BSD, (L)GPLv2, and (L)GPLv3 at a brief glance at their codebase, which is quite surprising. (I wonder if shipping Chrome Browser knowingly includes libxz under the GPLv3 terms. If so, that ought to have certain useful outcomes for forcing their hand on Widevine.)

None of these questions would be of any relevance with a less restrictive license, whether BSD or CC-BY or even GPLv2.

Post reply on HN