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throw0101c

> HEIC is good, as long as you pinky promise to never ever leave Apple's ecosystem, ie HEIC sucks.

HEIC was developed by the MPEG folks and is an ISO standard, ISO/IEC 23008-12:2022:

* https://www.iso.org/standard/83650.html

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_For...

An HEIC image is generally a still frame from ITU-T H.265† (HEVC):

* https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/heif-avc-h-264-h-265-heic-and-...

OS support includes Windows 10 v1083, Android 10+, Ubuntu 20.04, Debian 10, Fedora 36. Lots of cameras and smartphones support it as well.

There's nothing Apple-specific about it. Apple went through the process of licensing H.265, so they got HEIC 'for free' and use it as the default image format because over JPEG it supports: HDR, >8-bit colour, etc.

†Like WebP was similar to an image/frame from a VP8 video.

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> OS support includes Windows 10 v1083

Ba-ha-ha... ha-ha... no.

Support is virtually non-existent. Every year or so, I try to use my Windows PC to convert a RAW photo taken with a high-end Nikon mirrorless camera to a proper HDR photo (in any format) and send it to my friends and family that use iDevices.

This has been literally impossible for the last decade, and will remain impossible until the heat death of the universe.

Read-only support is totally broken in a wide range of apps, including Microsoft-only apps. There are many Windows imaging APIs, and I would be very surprised if more than one gained HEIC support. Which is probably broken.

Microsoft will never support an Apple format, and vice versa.

Every single new photo or video format in the last 25 years has been pushed by one megacorp, and adoption outside of their own ecosystem is close to zero.

JPEG-XL is the only non-megacorp format that is any good any got and got multi-vendor traction, which then turned into "sliding backwards on oiled ice". (Google removed support from Chromium, which is the end of that sad story.)

>> OS support includes Windows 10 v1083

> Ba-ha-ha... ha-ha... no. […]

Feel free to hit "Edit" on the Wikipedia page and correct it then:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_For...

> Microsoft will never support an Apple format, and vice versa.

Once again, it's not an Apple format: it was developed by MPEG and is published by ISO/IEC, just like H.264 and H.265.

Or do you think H.264 and H.265 are an "Apple format" as well?

> It's not an Apple format

Create a HDR HEIC file on anything other than an Apple Device.

Upload it to an Apple Device.

Now use it any way: Forward it, attach it to a message, etc...

This won't work.

It won't ever work because the "standard" is not what Apple implements. They implement a few very specific subsets that their specific apps produce, and nothing else.

Nobody else implements these specific Apple versions of HEIC. Nobody.

For example, Adobe Lightroom can only produce a HEIC file on an Apple device.

My Nikon camera can produce a HDR HEIC file in-body, but it is useless on an Apple device because it's too dark and if forwarded in an iMessage... too bright!

It's a shit-show, comparable to "IPv6 support" which isn't.

That's not an argument. HEIC is to HEVC what WebP is to WebM. The lack of support in other products is due to developers not picking up the pace and sticking with "GIF, JPEG and PNG is good enough".

My Samsung Galaxy outputs HEIC by default afaik. It's configurable, and I can turn that off, but still HEIC is not apple specific.

> Every year or so, I try to use my Windows PC to convert a RAW photo taken with a high-end Nikon mirrorless camera to a proper HDR photo (in any format) and send it to my friends and family that use iDevices.

> This has been literally impossible for the last decade, and will remain impossible until the heat death of the universe.

It's possible right now with gainmap jpegs. Adobe can create them, Android captures in them now, and Apple devices can view them even. Or if they can't yet they can very soon, Apple announced support at the recent WWDC (Apple brands it "adaptive HDR")

There's something kinda hilariously ironic that out of all these new fancy image codecs be it HEIC, AVIF, or JPEG-XL, it's humble ol' JPEG that's the first to deliver not just portable HDR, but the best quality HDR of any format of any kind

It's not yet the end, a rust decoder is on the way:

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/pull/1064#iss...

One day, people will wonder why it took so long, and I'll smile =)

That's the decoder: https://github.com/libjxl/jxl-rs

(why they couldn't use jxl-oxide, I don't know)

Also good to know, the ff nightly feature for jpeg xl currently does NOT use the aforementioned decoder, it uses something else, hence it's worthless for testing at the moment...

> HEIC was developed by the MPEG folks

And the MPEG folks were so cool with video, all that licensing BS. Sounds great. No thanks!

Arent all MPEG patents expired?

No, they’re in a patent pool. There’s what looks like a relatively up-to-date list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via-LA#H.265/HEVC_licensors

5203 active patents for HEVC, 1480 for H.264. That's just plain insane! I get that video formats are complex, but complex enough to consist of 5000+ distinct, nontrivial inventions?

Many of those are just marginally related, and might not apply to the actual standard.

Confusingly, there are two different MPEGs in this context.

MPEG the standards group is organized by ISO and IEC, along with JPEG.

The one you’re thinking of - MPEG LA, the licensing company - is a patent pool (which has since been subsumed by a different one[1]) that’s unaffiliated with MPEG the standards group.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via-LA

So what good is it to have a separate entity doing the standard when the standard is unaffordable outside the top 500?

> And the MPEG folks were so cool with video, all that licensing BS. Sounds great. No thanks!

Not wrong, but this is a different topic/objection than the GP's 'being locked into Apple's ecosystem'.

And as the Wikipedia article for HEIC shows, there's plenty of support for the format, even in open source OSes.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_For...

As far as I know, that's only support for the container format. You can't actually decode HEIC without also installing libde265, which you are supposed to have a license for. I'm not even sure how you'd go about getting an individual license.

> You can't actually decode HEIC without also installing libde265, which you are supposed to have a license for. I'm not even sure how you'd go about getting an individual license.

Debian doesn't seem to have a problem with it:

* https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=libde265

* https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=libheif

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