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Is JPEG, PNG, etc a container format that could use arbitrary compression, like MKV? Or do we need a brand new format.
by sliverstorm 10y ago
Is JPEG, PNG, etc a container format that could use arbitrary compression, like MKV? Or do we need a brand new format.
- halomru 10y agoPNG 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.
- animal531 10y agoIf I remember correctly PNG can use different compression algorithms per scanline, although I doubt it's ever used as such.
- rleigh 10y agoWhile 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.
- joosters 10y agoThe 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.