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VLC Gains A BPG Decoder, But Will This Image Format Ever Take Off?

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  • VLC Gains A BPG Decoder, But Will This Image Format Ever Take Off?

    Phoronix: VLC Gains A BPG Decoder, But Will This Image Format Ever Take Off?

    The latest image format that's been trying to unseat JPEG as the dominant web image format is BPG. While there's still patent concerns over Better Portable Graphics as it's based on the intra-frame encoding of H.265/HEVC, VLC has picked up BPG decoding support...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    BPG, the latest irrelevant fad!
    Better Portable Graphics as it's based on the intra-frame encoding of H.265/HEVC
    This is a patent bomb. A trick to make sure there is no escape from the patents.
    It's obvious.

    If anyone is interested in a better graphic file format than JPG:

    PGF claims to achieve an improved compression quality over JPEG adding or improving features such as scalability. Its compression performance is similar to the original JPEG standard. Very low and very high compression rates (including lossless compression) are also supported in PGF.
    PGF can operate at higher compression ratios without taking more encoding/decoding time and without generating the characteristic "blocky and blurry" artifacts of the original DCT-based JPEG standard.[2] It also allows more sophisticated progressive downloads.
    The progressive and partial download features are very interesting for interactive, large images on the web.

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    • #3
      I asked some animal experts and they say it's a fox. Guard the chicken and the meat.

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      • #4
        It's a grey fox. We have a number of them in my neighborhood. They keep the rabbit and squirrel population (somewhat) down.

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        • #5
          I'm still waiting for a raster image format that's lossless like png but can easily be animated like GIF. If this is going to be it, I like it. I wonder why the guy didn't roll with VP9 though... I mean sure, I prefer HEVC over VP9 for my video files for various reasons, but at least we wouldn't have these licensing issues.

          And unseating JPEG is something I would find very welcome, no matter who does it! I hate that format.
          Last edited by rabcor; 09 January 2015, 11:37 AM.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by rabcor View Post
            I'm still waiting for a raster image format that's lossless like png but can easily be animated like GIF. If this is going to be it, I like it. I wonder why the guy didn't roll with VP9 though... I mean sure, I prefer HEVC over VP9 for my video files for various reasons, but at least we wouldn't have these licensing issues.

            And unseating JPEG is something I would find very welcome, no matter who does it! I hate that format.
            There are MNG and APNG. They are much less popular than GIF, btw.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by rabcor View Post
              I'm still waiting for a raster image format that's lossless like png but can easily be animated like GIF. If this is going to be it, I like it. I wonder why the guy didn't roll with VP9 though... I mean sure, I prefer HEVC over VP9 for my video files for various reasons, but at least we wouldn't have these licensing issues.

              And unseating JPEG is something I would find very welcome, no matter who does it! I hate that format.


              Sadly it's not successful.

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              • #8
                [QUOTE=plonoma;462979]BPG, the latest irrelevant fad!

                If anyone is interested in a better graphic file format than JPG:


                QUOTE]

                It is true that the licensing is somewhat troublesome, but the explosive trend in moving towards energy efficiency (both mobile and not), a compression format that was designed around massively parallel encode/decode capabilities, and a format that already has fixed function encode/decoders on the market... it just outweights the competition. A good OpenCL decoder (which already exists) can bring BPG/HEVC goodness to legacy devices as well, even mobile ones with less horsepower.

                If it weren't for the licesing, we'd all be swimming in HEVC and BPG goodness already. This way, it will be the one issue the world will have to deal with.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by rabcor View Post
                  I'm still waiting for a raster image format that's lossless like png but can easily be animated like GIF.
                  Both H.264 and H.265 can be lossless, x264 and x265 can produce lossless output.

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                  • #10
                    Originally posted by bibaheu View Post
                    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG

                    Sadly it's not successful.
                    Due in no small part to the "backwards compatible with static PNG files" part.

                    1. By design, any APNG file is also a valid static PNG file, just like every animated GIF is also a valid static GIF.
                    2. The PNG spec explicitly says that the static PNG header means "this is not an animation". (The intent being to avoid the "is this GIF animated or not?" morass.)
                    3. As a result, Mozilla maintains their own fork of libpng because the upstream maintainers refuse to accept APNG patches.
                    4. Most applications use mainline libpng for their PNG decoding.

                    I agree and, as such, any applications I write either do a load-save cycle to force PNGs they process to spec-compliance or, if that's too heavy, they use a simple check and then hand off to the "Failed: Corrupt" handler. (The message for which includes a note that "To protect our users, we are less tolerant of corrupt images than other applications. Depending on the nature of the corruption, you may be able to open the image in a tool such as MS Paint and re-save an un-corrupted copy.")

                    Of course, that's not just because I dislike APNG on ideological grounds. Such creations also tend to strip down animated GIFs because, if I wanted to let people upload a video, I'd let them upload a video. (And, at least then, users wouldn't need a little-known Firefox extension to add a pause/play button to limit distraction.)

                    ...but I'm still pissed that there's no HTML attribute or CSS property to control animation if I don't want to self-host the image. (Though I suppose, if I can find suitable Javascript image libraries, I could implement loading of external links using CORS, XMLHttpRequest, and an in-browser animation-stripping stage.)
                    Last edited by ssokolow; 09 January 2015, 01:18 PM.

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