The video scene has been shaken up by h.265 which introduced amazing compression levels over its h.264 predecessor, but what about us static image monkeys?
I’m looking for a high quality lossy compression format I could store my photos in for archival purposes. I want to use Adobe RGB or even ProPhoto RGB so I would like this format to support 10-bit precision or so. Is there anything like that showing signs of not dying out anytime soon?
PGF from 2000 supports 8 or 16-bit, nothing in-between AFAIK, and it’s 16 years old and still generally unsupported.
JPEG 2000 from 2000 is equally old and just not exciting by today’s standards. I couldn’t find any definitive information on supported bit depths, but its likely it supports 10-bit files (in addition to the obvious 8- and 16-bit modes), so at least there’s that.
JPEG XR seems good, if you can swallow who developed it. It supports a selection of bit depths including 10-bit. It’s not as old, coming from 2009, so one would assume it uses newer technology. It’s released under a BSD licence. But I don’t have any Linux program which would support it.
WebP from 2000 is a derivative of the shitty VP8. It is also released under the BSD licence. It only supports 8-bit YUV 4:2:0. Not for us.
BPG from 2014 supports “8 to 14” bits per sample, so probably 10-bit too, and it supports chroma subsampling off/4:2:2/4:2:0. It boasts much better compression than JPEG, metadata and lossless compression. It is based on h.265/HEVC, yay! But nothing supports it yet, boo (but web browsers can support it via 76kB of javascript, nice). It seems like a good choice. Maybe we should push for support of BPG in our software?
Comparison:
http://xooyoozoo.github.io/yolo-octo-bugfixes/#swallowtail&jpg=s&bpg=s
Specifically try “Mascot”, “Swallowtail” and “Zoo bird head”.
Get BPG:
http://bellard.org/bpg/
It seems that the technology BPG uses has licencing issues which may/does exclude it from free use.
Daala is a competing technology work-in-progress from xiph.org, intended to be a free format.