Pik – a new lossy image format for the internet(github.com) |
Pik – a new lossy image format for the internet(github.com) |
The decoder can be in different formats, e.g. bytecode, WASM, i386, ARM, etcetera. But of course, any binary decoders should be verified by the standards organization before it is published.
You can see it as a "democratization" of encodings.
It's the most serious attempt to date to make an open source replacement for JPEG which misses a lot of advances in data/image compression. I hope it stops the spreading of HEIF plagued by patents.
Unfortunately the license is holding back implementations.
The reference implementations are also open source (dual licensed between LGPL and Apache 2)... But even if you don't like those, you can write your own under whatever license you like. They're just implementations of a spec.
HEIF is just an image container format. The current implementation of HEIF supports JPEG, H.264, and H.265. So, yes, if you use H.264 or H.265 inside HEIF then you have all of those attendant patent licensing issues. But if you use JPEG inside HEIF or if someone implements support for VP8 or VP9 or eventually AV1 then I think you should be able to use HEIF royalty-free.
The GitHub repository is at: https://github.com/nokiatech/heif
The "License Grant" section of LICENSE.TXT sounds like it grants a royalty-free patent license to the HEIF format itself, exclusive of any codec patent licenses as you'd expect. So I think once VP9 or AV1 support is added HEIF may be a nice container format for images.
Have you considered using Daala's lapped transforms? They work with variable block sizes and are quite effective for still images.
Also, was there anything that motivated doing a custom image format rather than applying Butteraugli to WebP?
It uses the same 8x8 DCT blocks, but with adaptive quantization. Like JPEG it also codes DC separately, but with 8 predictors instead of 1, etc.
It's like a combination the Guetzli JPEG encoder and Lepton JPEG recompressor.
Any ideas why?
(And please don't say "patent free" unless you are certain Pik will not infringe on those same patents)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_For...
HEVC/HEIF: Absolutely can't use because patents. Pik: Maybe can't use because patents.
Pik has potential to be useful, HEVC does not.
Most people use patent-encumbered media formats all the time.
HEVC is going to have dedicated hardware support on most devices in the near future, and will therefore be power-efficient and fast to encode and decode.
Disclaimer: I have no idea what I am talking about. For all I know possible use of these instructions is already a feature of HEIF and that statement is irrelevant.
Worth noting: Skylake with Integrate Graphics includes an x265 encoder and decoder. If that can't be adapted to HEIF, that's a huge win for the format.
Can anyone explain this to me? It is posted under the Google organization. Are they just not actively supporting it?
> "This project is in the initial research stage, please don't use it for any purpose."
So it's not a product at all, it's a research project. In particular, not being a product means that if you try to store or distribute images in this format, they'll probably be hard to recover a few years from now.
(Yes, it means dick)
Joke aside, Pik is also Spades in German. Since its a compression library and it looks like Jan Wassenberg works at the the Zurich office, it might also be some food, in line with the other work they have been doing: brotli, butteraugli, brunsli, guetzli
Most names are poorly chosen by this standard, given the diversity of existing languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twatt,_Orkney
There is also a Minge Lane I used to drive past each day in a previous job. Always gave me a chuckle, being a Brit.
Just thought of the Teledyne Waterpik brand. What did they ever do with that in Denmark? According to this FB post:
https://www.facebook.com/JstTht/posts/134568413284684?_fb_no...
Quote:
Waterpik uses another name in Denmark. "Pik" is the common Danish word for male genitals. Most Danes can easily translate "water" to the danish word "vand". And "vandpik" is a term for the morning erection. "And you put that thing in your mouth?!?!"
/s
But I'll look forward to hearing about people sending a dick pic in pik format. ^_^
Despite the fact that Dutch people are often fluent in English, and despite the fact that we even had a prime-minister with the name 'Kok', there's a surprisingly low number of jokes, in my opinion, involving this particular surname. I guess somehow the context switch from Dutch to English is big enough that it's just not all that funny.
We can certainly discount Pik as soon as a patent that covers it is discovered, until then it's just a promising project to pay attention to.
Web browsers. H.264 was finalized in 2003 and while it was supported by Chrome at launch in 2010, it wasn't supported in Firefox until 2013, a full 10 years later, though admittedly support was in Flash in 2007.
> Most people use patent-encumbered media formats all the time.
A major difference between HEVC and other patent-encumbered formats is that HEVC has no single licensing pool with a clear pricing scheme. There's no single place you can go and say "I want HEVC" and know how much you're going to need to pay. Off the top of my head, there's MPEG-LA, HEVC Advance, Velos Media and Technicolor. All of them have different requirements and cost schemes. Also importantly, HEVC Advance was intending to charge for distribution separately from encoding.
As much as I hate MPEG-LA, it definitely helped with H.264's adoption.
> HEVC is going to have dedicated hardware support on most devices in the near future, and will therefore be power-efficient and fast to encode and decode.
Yes but that hardware support needs to be piped through to browsers, which will take time and consent. Is Mozilla going to allow patent-encumbered HEVC into its browser when it's part of AOM and AV1 is just around the corner?
To be clear, I'm mainly talking about web browsers, since they're how most people consume images these days. I'm sure HEVC will find its way into things like TVs, cameras and home theatre systems without issue but I have doubts about its viability on the web.
As a result the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) was formed by major hardware and software companies. AOM is developing an alternative to HEVC. AOM has almost all hardware manufacturers of any significance as members.
[1]: Other essential patent holders who have not officially licensed their patents include AT&T, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, and Cisco. They may elect to license their patents unilaterally, which adds additional uncertainty to HEVC.
On the server side, if you're processing images to create multiple versions anyway (thumbnails, different sizes for mobile & desktop, etc.), throwing WebP versions in there is simple enough and should reduce bandwidth use. It's not worth doing if you're not fully automating image handling for other reasons.
Or you can ask to retain ownership of your project, but then you don't get to do any of the above. This option is also sometimes (thanks DannyBee for correcting me) not available if your project is considered to be too similar to some critical Google interest. The basic idea is outlined here: https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/
Speaking as an IARC committee member, this is not quite correct. We have in fact, approved plenty of stuff that is close to what google is working on. For example, we've approved plenty of search engines. (The overall approval rate is >96% last i looked).
It's not so simple that i can easily draw principled bright lines for you though :)
People, for the most part, very badly misunderstand what california law says. For most large diversified corporations, the corporation will own all of it, because it will "Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer;"
Note that it's completely irrelevant what the employee is doing for them. Also note that most employees rarely have any idea of all the things their employer does.
By numbers, employees lose the vast majority of lawsuits under 2870 in california.
(I believe that the fact that people think it is so great is one of the things that holds us back from making it actually great)
Okay, google makes software and if you make software on your spare time maybe it's reasonable that company does not want to leak IP and thus produces these contracts.
But what about these stupid examples:
- Building a backyard deck for your house - Taking pictures as a hobby - Doing woodworking (e.g. making a chair and a table for your home office) - etc..
So with this contract, Goggle owns my deck, desk, chair and a picture of these items, because I produced them on my spare time? Will horde of lawyers will come to my house and take my deck, desk, chair and picture of those items, because I used them while working remotely and bought tools to build them with the salary they payed me?
Even if those examples are completely rubbish and won't stand in court for Google, it's still absurd idea. You get payed salary for your time and work - that's it! That's where Google's power ends. After hours you go home and it's bullshit that they can own your personal work done on your own freetime at your private property with private tools and your own ideas. If they want to own everything then they should pay hourly average times 24hours , times 365 days per year as a salary, because I am giving all my time and work for them, while I am in contract with them.
EDIT: quote from Google's Personal Projects (IARC) [1]:
> Because Google’s business interests are so wide and varied, this likely applies to any personal project you have. That includes new development on personal projects you created prior to employment at Google.
Well that's just messed up.
"Even if those examples are completely rubbish and won't stand in court for Google, it's still absurd idea. You get payed salary for your time and work - that's it! That's where Google's power ends. After hours you go home and it's bullshit that they can own your personal work done on your own freetime at your private property with private tools and your own ideas. If they want to own everything then they should pay hourly average times 24hours , times 365 days per year as a salary, because I am giving all my time and work for them, while I am in contract with them. "
You are sorely confused about the state of the law in the US. In the US, in most states, it doesn't even have to be written into an employment contract. The employer will simply own the IP, period.
There is an internal process to have google release any copyright they may hold on any project you produce on your own time without using corp resources. All it requires is going through a standard and a (mostly) boilerplate legal review.
I guess the former, and the author might be doing it as a 20% project owned by Google in the hopes of making it a larger, more successful project.
If you do it during your break time, even if it’s produced on company machines, it remains yours, the company has no right to it. (in Germany).
I asked about it, but without raising a formal complaint, I didn't get more than the general logic, which is "because you also learn from experiences on the job, it's unfair if you can can put stuff together and then sell it or even give it away for free to potential competitors".
I'm still considering whether or not to make a big deal out of it in future contracts; but next month I'm going to do a master's anyway, so it was a temporary limitation (and I accepted with that in mind).
Check out the top comment from @grellas here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2208056
At the end, he mentions that general statements never apply to everybody, and unique situations vary. Additionally, in California the law protects moreso than other states.
but grellas doesn't actually disagree with me anywhere?
FWIW: I'm also an IP attorney, and among other things, have been doing "invention assignment" work for quite a while. I'm very familiar with the employment law situation in california, and this area in particular.
" Additionally, in California the law protects moreso than other states."
I didn't say it didn't? I said it's not as good as people seem to think
well I am glad I am not working in US then..
Do you happen to know if this is because only very strong cases materialize?
Most employers have no desire to sue employees, so most of these settle or get ignored, AFAIK.
At least in the case of Google (literally, i have no concept of other Alphabet companies), the only cases i'm aware of where Google has claimed it owned something was when the employee sued Google first.
example: A former employee suing Google over a patent developed while employed by Google, google counterclaims it owns that patent under the IP agreement.
The only way to win is to not have ideas.
You will find the same issue at any large diversified company. Quite literally.