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by gaazoh 840 days ago
Of course it didn't, it wasn't designed to be either the fastest nor the best. Just OK and simple. Yet in some cases it's not completely overtaken by competition, and I think that's cool.

I don't believe QOI will ever have any sort of real-world practical use, but that's quite OK and I love it for it has made me and plenty of others look into binary file formats and compression and demystify it, and look further into it. I wrote a fully functional streaming codec for QOI, and it has taught me many things, and started me on other projects, either working with more complex file formats or thinking about how to improve upon QOI. I would probably never have gotten to this point if I tried the same thing starting with any other format, as they are at least an order of magnitude more complex, even for the simple ones.
3 comments
theon144 840 days ago
>I don't believe QOI will ever have any sort of real-world practical use

Prusa (the 3d printer maker) seems to think otherwise! https://github.com/prusa3d/Prusa-Firmware-Buddy/releases/tag...

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lonjil 840 days ago
> Of course it didn't, it wasn't designed to be either the fastest nor the best. Just OK and simple. Yet in some cases it's not completely overtaken by competition, and I think that's cool.

Actually, there was a big push to add QOI to stuff a few years ago, specifically due to it being "fast". It was claimed that while it has worse compression, the speed can make it a worthy trade off.

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p0nce 840 days ago
It can be interesting if you need fast decode on low complexity, and it's an easy to improve format (-20 to -30%). Base QOI isn't that great.
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