News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Lepton image compression: saving 22% losslessly from imag... by sliverstorm on Thursday July 14, 2016 @02:15PM (#12096095)
Is JPEG, PNG, etc a container format that could use arbitrary compression, like MKV? Or do we need a brand new format.
Re:Lepton image compression: saving 22% losslessly from imag... by joosters on Thursday July 14, 2016 @04:22PM (#12096885)
The JPEG file format is pretty detailed, there are lots of places in the file where you could indicate that the image has been compressed with a different algorithm. But it wouldn't really help, because older decompressors will still not be able to interpret the new codec. They would be able to parse the file and read the metadata in it - like image width and height, timestamps, camera details, and so on, but there's no way it can decompress the data.
Re:Lepton image compression: saving 22% losslessly from imag... by halomru on Thursday July 14, 2016 @02:54PM (#12096357)
PNG is a very nice, extensible container format. In principle you can use it to store arbitrary image data, and still make use of all established metadata fields.

In practice you probably shouldn't do that without changing the file extension and the magic bytes to avoid confusion among users and poorly written software.

Re:Lepton image compression: saving 22% losslessly from imag... by rleigh on Sunday July 17, 2016 @05:55AM (#12109603)
While PNG (and libpng) are reasonable for their intended purpose as a GIF replacement for simple RGB and greyscale graphics, it doesn't compare when it comes to the power and flexibility of TIFF, from sample format and depth, to sample count, image orientation, tiling and many additional features.

TIFF is showing its age at this point, with a some high-end scientific applications switching to HDF5. But PNG simply isn't featureful enough for this type of data.

Re:Lepton image compression: saving 22% losslessly from imag... by animal531 on Friday July 15, 2016 @08:50AM (#12100579)
If I remember correctly PNG can use different compression algorithms per scanline, although I doubt it's ever used as such.