It will be great when you only need one file for all of your responsive image versions and can just take the part you need. Plug - I wrote about this in my high performance web app book along with other types of compression (https://www.packtpub.com/mapt/book/Application%20Development...).
I'm not convinced that FLIF can really do that. One file for all versions is a nice idea, but in practice, the first 20KB of a progressive FLIF is often an inferior substitute for a 20KB JPEG, to say nothing of BPG.
Note that the image in the example was chosen specifically to highlight FLIF's strengths, but the math shows that you could combine the uninterlaced FLIF with the 17KB JPEG 2000 and still take up less space than the interlaced FLIF.
FLIF looks like a very impressive lossless codec indeed, and even is competitive when used as a lossy codec, but the quality of partially downloaded interlaced files just isn't competitive with lossy codecs--including lossy FLIF.
I agree: if you're fine with lossy, then it's hard to beat lossy formats with a lossless format.
Maybe in some future version of FLIF, with some DCT/DWT-like transform and an option to postpone least significant bits until the end of the bitstream, we can truly get there. But at the moment we're not there yet.
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FLIF is pretty neat. I hope it takes off, which it might do as Jon works for Cloudinary.
I assume the news is this recent conference paper: http://flif.info/papers/FLIF_ICIP16.pdf
It will be great when you only need one file for all of your responsive image versions and can just take the part you need. Plug - I wrote about this in my high performance web app book along with other types of compression (https://www.packtpub.com/mapt/book/Application%20Development...).
I'm not convinced that FLIF can really do that. One file for all versions is a nice idea, but in practice, the first 20KB of a progressive FLIF is often an inferior substitute for a 20KB JPEG, to say nothing of BPG.
See: http://flif.info/example.html
Note that the image in the example was chosen specifically to highlight FLIF's strengths, but the math shows that you could combine the uninterlaced FLIF with the 17KB JPEG 2000 and still take up less space than the interlaced FLIF.
FLIF looks like a very impressive lossless codec indeed, and even is competitive when used as a lossy codec, but the quality of partially downloaded interlaced files just isn't competitive with lossy codecs--including lossy FLIF.
I agree: if you're fine with lossy, then it's hard to beat lossy formats with a lossless format.
Maybe in some future version of FLIF, with some DCT/DWT-like transform and an option to postpone least significant bits until the end of the bitstream, we can truly get there. But at the moment we're not there yet.
It's still a nice lossless format though :)
ICIP also included a lossless image compression comparison (though much less detailed than their lossy image comparison) https://people.xiph.org/~tdaede/icip2016_small.pdf