Quote:
Originally Posted by iwod
I wonder if some day 5G and 6G mobile network means low bitrate usage will be a thing of the past.
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The future is not super low bitrate, low filesize paradise. Instead, the future will be all about high resolution, HDR (10bit or greater). This comes at a significant cost.
Let's look at BMP for instance. BMP is undeniably the best quality because it's uncompressed. Anything uncompressed is highest, but then you run straight into a brick wall where, BMP is a terrible format to deliver across the internet due to bandwidth reasons. Okay, so now in this era, BMP isn't such a big problem anymore, until you start getting up into the higher resolutions. 4K+ images are insane to deliver as BMP, so we're back to hitting a brick wall.
The lesson I'm trying to get at is, just because you have improvements in network, does not mean that an unoptimized, or poorly optimized format is going to suddenly become the mainstay. If this were the case, we'd be capturing 8K resolution 60fps movies in BMP. You have hardware constraints, as well as bandwidth constraints.
Now, you might jump to PNG over BMP, but let's look at the facts there. PNG is fantastic for low to medium resolution images (basically images 2K and smaller). Once you get up to 4K, 8K, and even higher territory, no amount of PNG optimization is sufficient. You start hitting walls in both filesize, bandwidth, encode time, decode time, and all sorts of issues.
Now you have FLIF, which claims to solve all sorts of problems, but it doesn't solve the encode time, in fact it does the exact opposite by super inflating it. Saving a 4K image as FLIF takes like, 8 times longer than PNG before you apply the other crush algorithms to it.
Now, imagine an 8K resolution, 10-bit future. Should we still be using PNG for this? Absolutely not. The filesize grows exponentially. The encode and decode time grows exponentially. Everything about it grows exponentially. But with 8K HDR monitors on the horizon, the web will inevitably transition to high resolution, 16-bit images to take advantage of the higher dynamic range and pixel density. And with that, you will need to continue using a lossy format that can optimize better than current day formats.
This is why it's so important to improve upon a 2 decade old format. It doesn't help us transition to the future, in fact it hurts us.
If anybody feels like arguing, just ask yourself why HEVC exists? It exists to solve 2 problems. Enable low bitrate, low resolution situations for bandwidth limited situations, and also propel us into the future with 8K, HDR, high framerate situations.
That's why I feel like anybody mocking the existence of all these new image formats is a moron. They're so smug about it, but yet they're complete morons and just simply don't realize it.
We still have a decade or 2 left before the constraints of today cease being a major issue due to improvements in hardware and network, but solving those problems now, will enable even less saturated hardware and networks in the future, and promote further growth.