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Comment by scosman | Hacker News Reader

Thank god they went with a standard this time. When they launched HEIC, there wasn’t a single workable open source decoder. Hell, there wasn’t even a single non-Apple decoder.

XL color depth looks amazing.

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An annoying oversight is that while my Fujifilm camera is modern enough to shoot HEIF+RAW, Apple Photos only knows to group JPEG+RAW as a single photo. Because Apple did not spend a day of engineering time bringing feature parity for the file format they themselves promoted, it has turned into a bigger feature to match and merge the HEIF and RAW assets after the fact. After several years, I'm growing doubtful they'll ever accomplish it.

I have yet to see whether they did it right with JXL+RAW (or is it DNG+RAW?) but hopefully they will before it becomes available in mainstream cameras.

Apple's ProRAW format is Linear DNG, that is to say, already debayered, not what most people would call "raw". Previously they've used Lossless JPEG for compression inside these DNG files, but now they use JXL.

The DNG spec also allows for using JXL to compress proper raws, but I don't know if anyone is doing this yet. I know Samsung uses JXL compression in DNGs produced by their phones, but I haven't checked if those are proper raws or debayered.

HEIC is a standard too - it wasn’t a secret internal Apple project…

It might be a standard, but for a long time the licensing costs were exorbitant, and that likely stifled adoption. While licensing costs have come down, the pushback against HEIC’s pricing led to the development of better, royalty-free alternatives—including JPEG XL. Thank god they went with an unencumbered standard this time.

Windows showing you a popup saying you need to buy a £0.79 windows add on to just open photos taken with an iPhone was always unbelievable. Like some kind of malware or something.

In what context was thisnprompt appearing. I can not think of a time I have ever struggled to be able to open a photo from my iPhone in any of the apps I commonly use. Is this a Windows application issue or an OS issue, and how were the photos coming to your machine?

Just to clarify, this is an honest question not sarcasm.

If you directly download the HEIC photos to your windows PC.

The iPhone tends to convert to jpeg whenever you email/whatsapp/etc a photo, so it's only direct file import that nets the original HEIC file.

Exactly, I'd upload a bunch of photos to Google Drive to download to my PC, Google Drive could open them fine, but the default windows photo viewer app would demand payment to open them.

Well, Windows wouldn't display the HDR part of the image, so you're still not exactly seeing it.

Haha, that's rich. I have never seen this popup (haven't had the use case), was it this one?

https://helpdeskgeek.com/wp-content/pictures/2020/10/02-HEVC...

Yep, that's the one.

Yes, OP worded this a bit incorrectly. Open source, royalty-free standard would be better.

Not really. It was a 2 company colab with a pseudo spec. But their implementation had quirks that weren’t in the spec, and weren’t documented anywhere.

We spend a week building a decoder and kept finding new undocumented bits.

I wouldn’t call it a standard when zero folks outside Apple had access a reliable decoder at launch.

Thank god they went with a standard because when they went with a standard it wasn’t widespread?

What?

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