Slashdot reader Tesseractic comes bearing gifts — specifically, news of “a new image format that is lossless, gives much faster encodes, faster decodes and roughly comparable compression compared to what’s in use today.”
Quite OK Image format (or QOI) is the brainchild of developer Dominic Szablewski, who complains current image formats like PNG, JPEG, MPEG, MOV and MP4 “burst with complexity at the seams,” the Register reports:
“Every tiny aspect screams ‘design by consortium’,” he added, going on to lament the fact that most common codecs are old, closed, and “require huge libraries, are compute hungry and difficult to work with.” Szablewski thought he could do better and appears to have achieved that objective by cooking up some code, floating it on GitHub, and paying attention to the 500-plus comments it generated.
While Szablewski admits that QOI will not compress images as well as an optimized PNG encoder, he claims it “losslessy compresses images to a similar size of PNG, while offering 20x-50x faster encoding and 3x-4x faster decoding.” Most importantly, to Szablewski, the reference en-/decoder fits in about 300 lines of C and the file format spec requires is just one page long.
“In the last few weeks QOI implementations for lot of different languages and libraries popped up,” Szablewski wrote on his blog, with Zig, Rust,Go, TypeScript, Haskell, Ä, Python, C#, Elixir, Swift, Java, and Pascal among the options.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.