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Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

If possible, I’d much prefer having a single format that is widely supported, hardware accelerated, and with a state-of-the-art codec. Making content authors create multiple different files in different formats—some with deficient feature support—sounds like a pain in the butt for everyone.

If we can get everyone to agree on a format that handles layers, exposure bracketing, transparency, animation, high bit depth, different color models, both lossy and lossless compression, every common type of metadata, etc., that would be great.

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If your format handles everything it isn't a format, it just is everything. (The one you want is TIFF though.)

The point is that you want support for those features (certainly the core codecs, etc.) in the spec, so if you send someone a file you can be sure they can read it.

TIFF is not useful if you want to use a state-of-the-art lossy codec and get hardware-accelerated decoding on an arbitrary mobile device, or if you want to display an animated image with transparency on a web page.

But can you actually get people to implement it if you make it that complicated? Images are pretty hard, hardware support is /actually/ really hard.

That's why it's best to accept whatever format is already out there and author to it - the only thing that matters is that it actually works when it's out there.

Actually I'm surprised there's still no good way to do animations with transparency, but maybe nobody wants to use it?

Yes! This is one of the motivations behind HEIF: it's codec agnostic and extensible. You can use HEIF with JPEG and AVC for example, or some new codec down the line.

It's also extensible, in that you can define new item types and box structures to describe any new imaging construct you like. For example, you could host images with alpha, depth maps, stereo left/right channels, a HDR image with each of the raw brackets and the final fused image, etc.

The format relies upon the ISO Base Media File Format file-type branding to distinguish the infinite possibilities into a clear set of capabilities required for playback; in the same way MPEG4 does for video codec profile and levels.

There are services like Imgix that will do the conversion automatically on the fly, you don't have to convert images manually.

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