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The section "Works on any kind of image" is really misleading, as it mentions JPEG as a lossy format (alongside JPEG 2000) then says "FLIF beats anything else

by Latty 7y ago

The section "Works on any kind of image" is really misleading, as it mentions JPEG as a lossy format (alongside JPEG 2000) then says "FLIF beats anything else in all categories." It really needs a giant caveat saying "lossless". I mean, that's still great and impressive, but it clearly doesn't erase the need for a user to switch formats as a lossless format is still not suitable for end users a lot of the time. (It does have a lossy mode, detailed on another page, but they clearly show it doesn't have the same advantage over other formats there.)

azinman2 7y ago
It literally stands for "FLIF - Free Lossless Image Format", and the first sentence is "FLIF is a novel lossless image format which outperforms PNG, lossless WebP, lossless BPG, lossless JPEG2000, and lossless JPEG XR in terms of compression ratio." Seems like they're doing a pretty decent job at communication it's lossless to me.
- kragen 7y ago
  It would be reasonable to interpret the shorter boast as making the very surprising claim that it beats anything else, including lossy JPEG, in all categories of performance, including compression ratio. As it turns out, they don't intend to claim that, because it's not true. It's probably impossible for a lossless file format to do that, even for commonly occurring images. (It's certainly possible for a lossless image format to do that for images that have a lot of redundancy in a form that JPEG isn't sophisticated enough to recognize.)
  - lisper 7y ago
    > It's probably impossible for a lossless file format to do that, even for commonly occurring images. It's actually provably impossible using a simple counting argument. A lossy algorithm can conflate two non-identical images and encode them the same way while a lossless algorithm can't, so on average the output of a lossless algorithm is necessarily larger than a lossy one because it has to encode more possible outputs.
    - kragen 7y ago
      Yes, of course it's impossible to losslessly compress all possible images by even a single bit. But how predictable is the content of typical images? How much structure do they have? They certainly have a lot more structure than PNG or even JPEG exploits. Some of the “loss” of lossy JPEG is just random sensor noise, which places a lower bound on the size of a losslessly compressed image, but we have no idea how much.
      - lisper 7y ago
        Doesn't matter. Whatever you do to compress losslessly you can always do better if you're allowed to discard information. And the structure is part of the reason. For lossless compression you have to keep all the noise, all the invisible details. With lossy compression you're allowed to discard all that.
        kragen 7y ago
        Yes, that's what I said.
        lisper 7y ago
        Just for the record: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22272837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22272837
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      You should take more time before you start throwing out terms like "provably impossible". A sufficiently bad lossy algorithm can be worse than an algorithm like PNG in every single case. For example, a format based on PPM that can lossily reduce the file size by up to half.
      - lisper 7y ago
        > A sufficiently bad lossy algorithm can be worse than an algorithm like PNG in every single case. Well, yeah, obviously if you want to shoot yourself in the foot that is always possible. But for any lossless algorithm it is trivial to derive a corresponding lossy algorithm that will compress better than the lossless one.
  - monktastic1 7y ago
    Surely nobody could interpret this as beating an arbitrarily lossy format. I could just erase the entire input, after all. One would have to incorporate quality into the metric. Because of that, it seems natural to assume they mean lossless.
    - playpause 7y ago
      If a given lossy format is inefficient enough, then it’s possible for a lossless format to beat it at compression. I initially interpreted the website as making the surprising claim that FLIF beats several popular lossy formats while itself being lossless. Most people understand “JPEG” to mean the popular lossy format, JPEG. The site could be a lot clearer that that they are actually comparing it to lossless JPEG, lossless WEBP, etc.
- ehsankia 7y ago
  If we're going to switch to a new format, it would preferably support and be good at everything, including animation, lossy, alpha, metadata and color profiles. What the first graph shows me is that this format is slightly better than WebP in one aspect, ignoring half the other features of it. Considering WebP is already far more ahead in terms of adoption, I'm happy sticking with that instead. It's natively supported in most browser and many graphics softwares, which is the real uphill battle for a new file format.
  - lazyjeff 7y ago
    WebP only needs Safari browser support before it's officially supported by all modern browsers.
joshspankit 7y ago
If you can download an arbitrarily-small amount of a lossless image and end up with a copy of reduced quality, would you even need a lossy image format for most browser use-cases?
jiofih 7y ago
The page offers a pretty deep comparison at https://flif.info/example.html https://flif.info/example.html FLIF relies on progressive loading instead of lossy compression, and still beats BPG and WebP except on the very low end.

by Latty 7y ago

azinman2 7y ago

It literally stands for "FLIF - Free Lossless Image Format", and the first sentence is "FLIF is a novel lossless image format which outperforms PNG, lossless WebP, lossless BPG, lossless JPEG2000, and lossless JPEG XR in terms of compression ratio." Seems like they're doing a pretty decent job at communication it's lossless to me.

kragen 7y ago
It would be reasonable to interpret the shorter boast as making the very surprising claim that it beats anything else, including lossy JPEG, in all categories of performance, including compression ratio. As it turns out, they don't intend to claim that, because it's not true. It's probably impossible for a lossless file format to do that, even for commonly occurring images. (It's certainly possible for a lossless image format to do that for images that have a lot of redundancy in a form that JPEG isn't sophisticated enough to recognize.)
- lisper 7y ago
  > It's probably impossible for a lossless file format to do that, even for commonly occurring images. It's actually provably impossible using a simple counting argument. A lossy algorithm can conflate two non-identical images and encode them the same way while a lossless algorithm can't, so on average the output of a lossless algorithm is necessarily larger than a lossy one because it has to encode more possible outputs.
  - kragen 7y ago
    Yes, of course it's impossible to losslessly compress all possible images by even a single bit. But how predictable is the content of typical images? How much structure do they have? They certainly have a lot more structure than PNG or even JPEG exploits. Some of the “loss” of lossy JPEG is just random sensor noise, which places a lower bound on the size of a losslessly compressed image, but we have no idea how much.
    - lisper 7y ago
      Doesn't matter. Whatever you do to compress losslessly you can always do better if you're allowed to discard information. And the structure is part of the reason. For lossless compression you have to keep all the noise, all the invisible details. With lossy compression you're allowed to discard all that.
      - kragen 7y ago
        Yes, that's what I said.
        lisper 7y ago
        Just for the record: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22272837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22272837
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    You should take more time before you start throwing out terms like "provably impossible". A sufficiently bad lossy algorithm can be worse than an algorithm like PNG in every single case. For example, a format based on PPM that can lossily reduce the file size by up to half.
    - lisper 7y ago
      > A sufficiently bad lossy algorithm can be worse than an algorithm like PNG in every single case. Well, yeah, obviously if you want to shoot yourself in the foot that is always possible. But for any lossless algorithm it is trivial to derive a corresponding lossy algorithm that will compress better than the lossless one.
- monktastic1 7y ago
  Surely nobody could interpret this as beating an arbitrarily lossy format. I could just erase the entire input, after all. One would have to incorporate quality into the metric. Because of that, it seems natural to assume they mean lossless.
  - playpause 7y ago
    If a given lossy format is inefficient enough, then it’s possible for a lossless format to beat it at compression. I initially interpreted the website as making the surprising claim that FLIF beats several popular lossy formats while itself being lossless. Most people understand “JPEG” to mean the popular lossy format, JPEG. The site could be a lot clearer that that they are actually comparing it to lossless JPEG, lossless WEBP, etc.
ehsankia 7y ago
If we're going to switch to a new format, it would preferably support and be good at everything, including animation, lossy, alpha, metadata and color profiles. What the first graph shows me is that this format is slightly better than WebP in one aspect, ignoring half the other features of it. Considering WebP is already far more ahead in terms of adoption, I'm happy sticking with that instead. It's natively supported in most browser and many graphics softwares, which is the real uphill battle for a new file format.
- lazyjeff 7y ago
  WebP only needs Safari browser support before it's officially supported by all modern browsers.

joshspankit 7y ago

If you can download an arbitrarily-small amount of a lossless image and end up with a copy of reduced quality, would you even need a lossy image format for most browser use-cases?

jiofih 7y ago

The page offers a pretty deep comparison at https://flif.info/example.html https://flif.info/example.html FLIF relies on progressive loading instead of lossy compression, and still beats BPG and WebP except on the very low end.