91–100 of 339 posts
I have been wishing there was a JPEG equivalent with an alpha channel for like forever. That allows better compositing to arbitrary background images or patterns. Now the question is how long before browsers might support it natively.
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…
People are too sensitive. I'm a hetero male, and I don't find the image 'fun' at all... it's just an image. It doesn't send a message to anyone. If anything, I don't really care for it for image algorithm tests because the palette is fairly flat. No matter how you feel about the image itself, though, there is value in continuing to use it... people are familiar with it, to the point of it becoming almost cliché. This…
The results only show marginal improvement. What's needed is a compression method that doesn't introduce artifacts on hard edges, as JPEG does, but is otherwise no worse at compression than JPEG. Then we wouldn't need to do some things in JPEG and others in PNG, and we'd be spared the pain of JPEG screenshots. Much better results on the Tecnick image set (which is mostly hard edges) would indicate one had been found.…
The results only show marginal improvement. The improvement is far from marginal. In particular: ... I just tried to link you to a BPG image, and discovered that I can't. Well, I'm going to ignore that little flaw for the moment, because that's just a browser feature. If BPG catches on, that's sure to change. Anyway, the improvement is far from marginal: http://a.pomf.se/cdywsc.png In particular, look around her face…
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…
Not everything is about gender, sexism, feminism, or chauvinism. There are very few things in the world that are not somehow associated with male vs. female in an objectively equal way. The Lena in question is just an image with a long tradition. Anyone can find and use a male image for his/her own image compression tests if s/he wants to. It's not a statement to use Lena instead.
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/
He should be working on Daala next (for both video and image formats). Let's make the next media formats for the web truly open source. > Based on a subset of the HEVC open video compression standard. So BPG is patent-encumbered, right?
tl;dr (obviously tl;dr): This format is very, very easy to implement despite the patent risk, simply by assuming that any device new enough to be considering including it will have already licensed the relevant patents.
Wow, I didn't even know there were open-source HEVC encoders. I thought there were patent issues. Now I'm off to re-encode my bluray collection!
The x265 [1] Project is great. That said, you might want to wait a year for them to improve the encode before messing with your entire collection. [1] http://x265.org
Yeah, who am I kidding, I'll just buy more hard drives to keep the originals :)
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I wonder how much that figure would drop if one could optimize the process for modern CPUs...
Even without optimizations. That page is from 1997. They probably ran this on a 200MHz machine at best. Modern CPUs are 30-50x faster just in terms of instructions per second. Then once you factor in multiple cores, we have desktop machines that are easily 100x faster. In terms of optimizations we have SIMD and GPGPUs to make it even faster. Not unrealistic to think we could bring that 6 minute figure down to one sec…
Without knowing how this scales with image size there is really no way to speculate about performance on modern hardware.
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Did you read the article? There were _several_ great test images used in the Mozilla study under suitable licenses, and Bellard did test with some of those. The Lena picture here wasn't particularly scientifically useful, it was presumably just used out of a sense of tradition. (Mozilla didn't use it.) http://people.mozilla.org/~josh/lossy_compressed_image_study...
What do you know, there are other attractive women in those photosets, including at least one that appears to be wearing roughly as little as Lena. It's almost like our brains are wired for facial recognition and thus attractive faces are good test subjects for image compression algorithms or something.
Wow, I didn't even know there were open-source HEVC encoders. I thought there were patent issues. Now I'm off to re-encode my bluray collection!
There are still patent issues, and you still need to obtain a license to use the software. You will never see this image format integrated into any other open source projects, like Firefox, for this reason.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you read the article? There were _several_ great test images used in the Mozilla study under suitable licenses, and Bellard did test with some of those. The Lena picture here wasn't particularly scientifically useful, it was presumably just used out of a sense of tradition. (Mozilla didn't use it.) http://people.mozilla.org/~josh/lossy_compressed_image_study...
What do you know, there are other attractive women in those photosets, including at least one that appears to be wearing roughly as little as Lena. It's almost like our brains are wired for facial recognition and thus attractive faces are good test subjects for image compression algorithms or something.