After 20 years, PNG is back with renewed vigor! A new PNG spec was just released.
    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      11 months

      WebP had been kind of moving in on its turf, based on what I’ve been seeing websites using.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    11 months

    What’s next?

    I know you all immediately wondered, better compression?. We’re already working on that. And parallel encoding/decoding, too! Just like this update, we want to make sure we do it right.

    We expect the next PNG update (Fourth Edition) to be short. It will improve HDR & Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) interoperability. While we work on that, we’ll be researching compression updates for PNG Fifth Edition.

    One thing I’d like to see from image formats and libraries is better support for very high resolution images. Like, images where you’re zooming into and out of a very large, high-resolution image and probably only looking at a small part of the image at any given point.

    I was playing around with some high resolution images a bit back, and I was quite surprised to find how poor the situation is. Trying viewing a very high resolution PNG in your favorite image-viewing program, and it’ll probably choke.

    • At least on Linux, it looks like the standard native image viewers don’t do a great job here, and as best I can tell that the norm is to use web-based viewers. These deal with poor image format support support for high resolutions by generating versions of the image at multiple pre-scaled levels and then slicing the image into tiles, saving each tile as a separate image, so that a web browser just pulls down a handful of appropriate tiles from a web server. Viewers and library APIs need to be able to work with the image without having to decode the whole image.

      gliv used to do very smooth GPU-accelerated panning and zooming — I’d like to be able to do the same for very high-resolution images, decoding and loading visible data into video memory as required.

    • The only image format I could find that seemed to do reasonably well was pyramidal TIFF.

    I would guess that better parallel encoding and decoding support is likely associated with solving this, since limiting the portion of the image that one needs to decode is probably necessary both for parallel decoding and for efficient high-resolution processing.

  • Almacca@aussie.zoneEnglish
    11 months

    Took me a second to realise you’re not talking about Papua New Guinea.

  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
    11 months

    Possibly the final version. Quite Okay Imaging (QOI) achieved similar compression with none of the complexity. Lossy + difference = lossless formats are surely the better option where performance is not crucial. Even the fact they fffucking finally made APNG official is decades late to replace GIF, since several image formats are now literally video formats.

    The future is webp. And telling software patents to burn in hell.

    • Flipper@feddit.org
      11 months

      As cool and impressive as Qoi is, as long as I can’t just send it to someone it’s sadly not a replacement for PNG.

      • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
        11 months

        Yeah, adoption’s not a feature you can design.

        The general idea may show up in any extensible format. Like a PNG encoder that only does Sub filter can encounter each pixel once.

        … wait, PNG filtering is byte-level? It doesn’t change with bit depth? Christ.

        • bob_lemon@feddit.org
          11 months

          That’s because Google removed the support from chrome after only a few months, and Mozilla never added it to Firefox. And although there’s apparently an extension for both, (lossy) image formats need out of the box browser support to have any chance for any kind adoption.

  • Irdial@lemmy.sdf.org
    11 months

    Great news! PNG has always been my image format of choice due to its relatively good compression and support for transparency.

    • KiwiTB@lemmy.world
      11 months

      Crazy huh but APNG was so well done it just showed the first frame like a normal PNG in any non supported browser which was amazing. I used to have an avatar which has the TF2 engineer as the first frame and the spy as the second.

    • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
      11 months

      WebP was the first widely supported format to support lossy transparency. It’s worth it for that alone.