fpng VS qoi

When the QOI format was first announced it wasn't clear that was even possible while keeping PNG format compatibility. But the fpng and fpnge C/C++ libraries showed it was, and today you can take advantage of those advances in a general purpose PNG library in Rust!

CRC is a table and 5 lines of code. That's trivial.

>zlib is 23k lines

It's not needed to make a PNG reader/writer. zlib is massive overkill for only making a PNG reader or writer. Here's a tiny deflate/inflate code [2] under 1k lines (and could be much smaller if needed).

stb[0] has single headers of ~7k lines total including all of the formats PNG, JPG, BMP,. PSD, GIF, HDR, and PIC. Here's [1] a 3k lines single file PNG version with tons if #ifdefs for all sorts of platforms. Removing those and I'd not be surprised if you could not do it in ~1k lines (which I'd consider quite simple compared to most of todays' media formats).

>Of course they're not common formats so you're stuck with complex formats like PNG

BMP is super common and easy to use anywhere.

I use flat image files all the time for quick and dirty stuff. They quickly saturate disk speeds and networking speeds (say recording a few decent speed cameras), and I've found PNG compression to alleviate those saturate CPU speeds (some libs are super slow, some are vastly faster). I've many times made custom compression formats to balance these for high performance tools when neither things like BMPs or things like PNG would suffice.

[0] https://github.com/nothings/stb

[1] https://github.com/richgel999/fpng/blob/main/src/fpng.cpp

[2] https://github.com/jibsen/tinf/tree/master/src

This was actually considered, and other libraries do ignore checksums, or at least have options to:

https://github.com/richgel999/fpng/issues/9

In the other direction, you can target a subset of PNG to get less optimized images but with QOI-like encode and decode speed: https://github.com/richgel999/fpng

On specific operations like screenshots for example the new version is WAY faster though. We were using stb_image_write.h but switched to fpng which promised 12-19x faster compression at smaller sizes. That and the fact that screenshot saving have now been given it's own thread so it now longer causes a small stutter like when it was on the main thread, means that screenshot are now near instantaneous.

I think QOI inspired the creation of https://github.com/richgel999/fpng which creates standard PNGs and compares itself directly to QOI.

BTW, today I found this fpng-fast PNG writer. There is a comparison with QOI in the readme.

Her request is politely-phrased and reasonable. I don't think there's a legal or ethical issue, but respecting the wishes of others when it costs nothing is just kindness.

However, the way that some have seized on it, and then interacted with others in their communities is ... neither polite nor reasonable.

e.g. https://github.com/phoboslab/qoi/issues/35

How do you know it's not a problem for the people who work with computer vision? Let's take this for example - sure, the request itself was presented very unprofessionally, but this is still an example of someone in a computer vision-adjacent field stating in no uncertain terms that they have a problem with the image.

Yes. Without a supporting statement, it's ad hominem. But I provided a supporting statement.

This is the issue I'm taking about: https://mobile.twitter.com/richgel999/status/146443578680850...

Which links to here: https://github.com/phoboslab/qoi/issues/35

Where everyone agrees, yes, the image should be removed. They didn't know about its history. Would he please stop being a gigantic asshole about it.

So if that's not blowing things out of proportion, I don't know what is.

I don't know about CUDA, however I've made an AVX2 based encoder a few months ago : https://github.com/phoboslab/qoi/pull/143

I intend to create an AVX2 based decoder but I had absolutely no time to work on side projects in the past three months.

You might also want to take a look at this streaming encoder if you want to encode large files with a tiny memory footprint : https://github.com/MKCG/php-qoi/blob/main/src/FFI/lib/qoi.c

Not only does compression improve this situation today, but using QOI means improvements may continue to come over time. QOI is a very new, open source image format, and that's already proving to be an advantage. By itself, QOI compression is pretty weak, but YoYoGames have forked it and worked in BZ2 compression to surpass the old PNG format. As QOI itself improves and as YoYoGames continues to work on it, it's almost guaranteed that we'll see the compression ratio in GameMaker get better over time.