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Comment by mark-r | Hacker News Reader

I was ready to pass by this post with a yawn until I saw where it was coming from: Fabrice Bellard. He's no doubt an absolute freakin' genius. And if anybody knows about image conversion, it's him.

Even the things he does just for fun are impressive. Have you ever booted up Linux inside your browser? http://bellard.org/jslinux/

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>I was ready to pass by this post with a yawn until I saw where it was coming from

Would this have been less interesting or valuable if it hadn't been made by a hacker celebrity?

New file format proposals generally aren't news, unless they're already implemented in some popular product. Finding out the latest amazing thing that Fabrice Bellard has been working on, that's news. And that it's already implemented in your browser via Javascript? Priceless.

This guys hacks become the mainstream implementation. Ever used qemu or ffmpeg?

Sounds like the author lends credibility to the proposal through past accomplishments, suggesting that the project is well planned and executed and thus worth checking out.

He should be working on Daala next (for both video and image formats). Let's make the next media formats for the web truly open source.

> Based on a subset of the HEVC open video compression standard.

So BPG is patent-encumbered, right?

At the bottom of the linked article is the answer to your question, with links to more information.

tl;dr (obviously tl;dr): This format is very, very easy to implement despite the patent risk, simply by assuming that any device new enough to be considering including it will have already licensed the relevant patents.

The patents would only cover the implementation that comes with the hardware, not any other software implementation running on it. This means you'd have to use the hardware decoder APIs to decode images, which is less than ideal when you want fast, low latency decoding.

But suing the party doing the infringing would be much harder. They can't just go after Google/Apple/Microsoft because all they're including is a javascript interpreter. They'd have to sue thousands and thousands of sites, most of them for amounts no larger than 1000 dollars.

not just about image compression, he also did some Tiny C compiler a while ago. he also had some other nice tech demos...

don't forget QEMU.

or ffmpeg

or his formula (Bellard's Formula) used for his pi calculation record.

and software radio stuff (sadly closed source and proprietary)

A man has to eat.

No one remembers LZEXE?

I certainly do.

Don't forget 'How to broadcast Digital TV using only a VGA monitor'. http://bellard.org/dvbt/

Thanks for pointing that out, I didn't notice. Fabrice is as great a hacker as it gets.

Having alpha channel support, 14 bits and better compression would be lovely.

100% agree with you, and in fact, as a proof, I didn't even know about Javascript Linux and I'm going to check it now :)

jslinux cool. I tried it; running Emacs in it - https://twitter.com/jouborg/status/541252302309715968

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