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FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

flif.info

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Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#81

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.

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 supporte…

WebP only needs Safari browser support before it's officially supported by all modern browsers.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thes…

So you're suggesting that the advantage JPEG XL has is that it will compress existing JPEGs better than FLIF or AVIF?

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#83
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…

Is this superior to HEIF and H.265 other than licensing being freer?

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#84
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Made by the same folks who brought you JPEG 2000. /s

I was a fan/proponent of that! Whatever happened to wavelet compression?

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#85

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 FL…

The issue with copy machines modifying glyphs isn’t a problem with all algorithms; Really, only that one. Instead of just discarding data like a lossy algorithm, it would notice similar sections of the image and make them the same.

Also, why not PNG?

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#86
post #60
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am most assuredly not missing the point. Your use-case is not my use-case. I sometimes render 50mb PNGs. The execution of decoder is insignificant compared to everything else. Also, my go-kart also gets more miles to the gallon than NASCAR team cars.

> I sometimes render 50mb PNGs. The execution of decoder is insignificant compared to everything else. Fair point but you have to admit that is a very niche use case. Have you compared the execution to native performance? Even decoding a 50MB JPEG in Chrome with turbojpeg is going to be a hard pill to swallow.

I do know it's a niche use case. And I for sure wouldn't recommend that every man and his dog use the polyfill. I'm not even sure it's right for the scenario I'm thinking of. But I can definitely contrive a case where it is.

I haven't benchmarked this specific thing, because I've never used it. But I might, because it sounds like a fun thing to do.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#87

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 FL…

The issue with copy machines modifying glyphs isn’t a problem with all algorithms; Really, only that one. Instead of just discarding data like a lossy algorithm, it would notice similar sections of the image and make them the same. Also, why not PNG?

> Also, why not PNG?

The article claims 43% improvement over typical PNGs, if you have a lot of images that's pretty significant.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#88
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…

If you can download an arbitrarily-small amount of a lossless image and end up with a copy of reduced quality, would you even need a lossy image format for most browser use-cases?

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#89
post #41

The very obvious thing missing from the site is decode and encode benchmarks. Its very context dependent but if it had a long decode time, that could outweigh the bandwidth savings.

That's exactly what I thought. About ten years everyone is rushing to distribute large downloads in xz format. These days some have started to move away from it just because how slow it is to compress and decompress.

Re: FLIF – Free Lossless Image Format

#90
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 thes…

So you're suggesting that the advantage JPEG XL has is that it will compress existing JPEGs better than FLIF or AVIF?

Sounds like it will just take an existing JPEG and reduce the size, but not re-compress it - so even though the original JPEG is lossy, there will be no additional loss introduced, whereas another format not based on JPEG would require a re-encode pass that would lose additional information.
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