[vladdanilov]

> New lossy image format gives 55 % less bytes than jpeg with the same butteraugli score.

It's the most serious attempt to date to make an open source replacement for JPEG which misses a lot of advances in data/image compression. I hope it stops the spreading of HEIF plagued by patents.

[pasta]

I had high hopes for FLIF. What I think is great is that the client can control how much data is downloaded. This is great for responsive use.

Unfortunately the license is holding back implementations.

[oliwarner]

> Unlike some other image formats (e.g. BPG and JPEG 2000), FLIF is completely royalty-free and it is not known to be encumbered by software patents.

The reference implementations are also open source (dual licensed between LGPL and Apache 2)... But even if you don't like those, you can write your own under whatever license you like. They're just implementations of a spec.

[jonsneyers]

How so? The FLIF reference implementation is Apache 2.0 licensed for the decoder, how does that hold back implementations?

[clouddrover]

I'm not certain, but I think HEIF itself is royalty-free.

HEIF is just an image container format. The current implementation of HEIF supports JPEG, H.264, and H.265. So, yes, if you use H.264 or H.265 inside HEIF then you have all of those attendant patent licensing issues. But if you use JPEG inside HEIF or if someone implements support for VP8 or VP9 or eventually AV1 then I think you should be able to use HEIF royalty-free.

The GitHub repository is at: https://github.com/nokiatech/heif

The "License Grant" section of LICENSE.TXT sounds like it grants a royalty-free patent license to the HEIF format itself, exclusive of any codec patent licenses as you'd expect. So I think once VP9 or AV1 support is added HEIF may be a nice container format for images.

[trevyn]

Uh, WebP?

[vladdanilov]

WebP lossy is aimed at low quality (Q<75) and YUV420 only.