And the MPEG folks were so cool with video, all that licensing BS. Sounds great. No thanks!
MPEG the standards group is organized by ISO and IEC, along with JPEG.
The one you’re thinking of - MPEG LA, the licensing company - is a patent pool (which has since been subsumed by a different one[1]) that’s unaffiliated with MPEG the standards group.
Not wrong, but this is a different topic/objection than the GP's 'being locked into Apple's ecosystem'.
And as the Wikipedia article for HEIC shows, there's plenty of support for the format, even in open source OSes.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_For...
Debian doesn't seem to have a problem with it:
Ba-ha-ha... ha-ha... no.
Support is virtually non-existent. Every year or so, I try to use my Windows PC to convert a RAW photo taken with a high-end Nikon mirrorless camera to a proper HDR photo (in any format) and send it to my friends and family that use iDevices.
This has been literally impossible for the last decade, and will remain impossible until the heat death of the universe.
Read-only support is totally broken in a wide range of apps, including Microsoft-only apps. There are many Windows imaging APIs, and I would be very surprised if more than one gained HEIC support. Which is probably broken.
Microsoft will never support an Apple format, and vice versa.
Every single new photo or video format in the last 25 years has been pushed by one megacorp, and adoption outside of their own ecosystem is close to zero.
JPEG-XL is the only non-megacorp format that is any good any got and got multi-vendor traction, which then turned into "sliding backwards on oiled ice". (Google removed support from Chromium, which is the end of that sad story.)
> Ba-ha-ha... ha-ha... no. […]
Feel free to hit "Edit" on the Wikipedia page and correct it then:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_For...
> Microsoft will never support an Apple format, and vice versa.
Once again, it's not an Apple format: it was developed by MPEG and is published by ISO/IEC, just like H.264 and H.265.
Or do you think H.264 and H.265 are an "Apple format" as well?
Create a HDR HEIC file on anything other than an Apple Device.
Upload it to an Apple Device.
Now use it any way: Forward it, attach it to a message, etc...
This won't work.
It won't ever work because the "standard" is not what Apple implements. They implement a few very specific subsets that their specific apps produce, and nothing else.
Nobody else implements these specific Apple versions of HEIC. Nobody.
For example, Adobe Lightroom can only produce a HEIC file on an Apple device.
My Nikon camera can produce a HDR HEIC file in-body, but it is useless on an Apple device because it's too dark and if forwarded in an iMessage... too bright!
It's a shit-show, comparable to "IPv6 support" which isn't.
> This has been literally impossible for the last decade, and will remain impossible until the heat death of the universe.
It's possible right now with gainmap jpegs. Adobe can create them, Android captures in them now, and Apple devices can view them even. Or if they can't yet they can very soon, Apple announced support at the recent WWDC (Apple brands it "adaptive HDR")
There's something kinda hilariously ironic that out of all these new fancy image codecs be it HEIC, AVIF, or JPEG-XL, it's humble ol' JPEG that's the first to deliver not just portable HDR, but the best quality HDR of any format of any kind
https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/pull/1064#iss...
One day, people will wonder why it took so long, and I'll smile =)
That's the decoder: https://github.com/libjxl/jxl-rs
(why they couldn't use jxl-oxide, I don't know)
Also good to know, the ff nightly feature for jpeg xl currently does NOT use the aforementioned decoder, it uses something else, hence it's worthless for testing at the moment...
HEIC was developed by the MPEG folks and is an ISO standard, ISO/IEC 23008-12:2022:
* https://www.iso.org/standard/83650.html
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_For...
An HEIC image is generally a still frame from ITU-T H.265† (HEVC):
* https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/heif-avc-h-264-h-265-heic-and-...
OS support includes Windows 10 v1083, Android 10+, Ubuntu 20.04, Debian 10, Fedora 36. Lots of cameras and smartphones support it as well.
There's nothing Apple-specific about it. Apple went through the process of licensing H.265, so they got HEIC 'for free' and use it as the default image format because over JPEG it supports: HDR, >8-bit colour, etc.
†Like WebP was similar to an image/frame from a VP8 video.