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Comment by haxiomic | Hacker News Reader

This is impressive, I was curious if it was just better on simpler images with many duplicate pixels but it's nice to see it working well with photography too

e.g. https://phoboslab.org/files/qoibench/images/wallpaper/EwZDbL...

            decode ms   encode ms   decode mpps   encode mpps   size kb
    libpng:     148.4      3995.5         55.88          2.08     12223
    stbi:       161.0      1858.3         51.50          4.46     19199
    qoi:         60.8        95.6        136.49         86.78     12868

I'm interested if there's a standardized benchmark used in the academic literature this could be tested against

In any case the results are impressive enough that this will 100% be used in projects I work on!

Many thanks to the author for their work <3

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When I download that PNG file it is 10785 KB. If I re-encode it using FLIF 0.4 (to my knowledge still the best off-the-shelf lossless image compression) it is 7368 KB. That's 57% of the size of qoi, quite a lot smaller. You pay for it in encode/decode time though.

Interestingly I actually managed to shave 400kb off of that PNG by just running it through some PNG optimizers. Not great savings but were still some to be had!

FLIF has been superseded[1] by JPEG XL, which, in my very limited testing, performed better (speed and compression-wise; libjxl) than FLIF.

Interesting though that FLIF 0.4 was released 3 days ago. I haven't checked out that new release (and won't), but the previous one wasn't great code and was a pain to use (ended up using its CLI instead of the lib). We ended up going back to PNG because of interoperability and speed. I haven't looked at libjxl's API yet.

Edit: 8605KB in 11.5s with libjxl, so it's not actually better than FLIF 0.4 (7368KB in 23.9s)

[1]: https://flif.info/#update

Yes, I am aware it has been 'superseded' but in my experience for lossless compression it's still usually better.

  pngcrush -brute  10355kb
  cjxl -q 100 -e 9  8413kb

Can be made smaller for sure, but if I'm say working with 10,000 images in my app and decoding all the time, a 3-4x speedup in the decode time can be a major saving for ~ 10-40% increase in file size with a lib I can just drop in my project without effort

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