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On your last point: I find it super annoying when both lossy and lossless codecs have the same name, and, more importantly, file extension. I get it that intern
by krick 7mo ago
On your last point: I find it super annoying when both lossy and lossless codecs have the same name, and, more importantly, file extension. I get it that internally they are "almost the same thing", just with one extra step of discarding low-impact values, but when I see a PNG/FLAC file I know, that if the file was handled properly and wasn't produced by Windows clipboard or something, it is supposed to represent exactly the original data. When I see JPEG/MP3, I know that whatever it went through, it is not the original data for sure. When I see WEBP, I assume it's lossy, because it's just how it's used, and I cannot just convert all my PNG files to a newer format, because after that I won't be able to tell (easily) which is the original and which is not.
- lifthrasiir 7mo agoAh, in that case you would be more annoyed to learn that lossy WebP and lossless WebP are completely distinct. They only share the container format and their type codes are different.
- krick 7mo agoAwesome. It would be interesting to learn why they even thought it is a good idea. Content-agnostic containers may make sense for video, but for the vast majority of use-cases a "video" is in fact a complex bundle of (several) video, audio, metadata tracks, so the "container" does much heavier lifting than specifying codec details and some metadata.
- jmalicki 7mo agoWhy would they want different container formats? No point in having multiple different metadata specs.
- account42 7mo agoThe PNG and FLAC format doesn't doesn't tell you that. While both specify lossless encoring algorithms (assuming data is already quantized to a supported bit depth), that doesn't prevent encoders from adding additional lossy preprocessing steps that improve compression - and there are several such encoders for PNG.