Image patents

[Linh Pham]

On 2004-04-27 00:00 +0200, "Simon L. Nielsen" <simon at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

# I think that's the only one, so I think we can live with loosing that.

I agree. I'm not much of a fan when it comes to animated images, mostly
because they tend to eat up extra bandwidth (which is something that I
don't have a lot of at home).

# I'm rather sure .png images support transparency.

It does, though IE and potentially Netscape 4.x have some issues with
alpha transparency... but it may not be something to worry about.

# Hmm, some .png images are much larger than their .jpg counterparts.
# E.g. :
# 
#  getstarb.jpg            26-Apr-2004 12:24    20k  
#  getstarb.png            26-Apr-2004 12:24   171k
# 
# That seems a bit exessive, but can hopefully fixed by using another
# program for the conversion (or tuning some parameters).
# 
# How much space does the .png images use compared to the .gif/.jpg
# versions ?

Since PNG is a lossless format, you can crank up the compression level
and not lose any details in the image (I think it just requires a bit
more CPU cycles to decompress the image... but I could be really wrong
there). 

For instance, I've converted a copy of the "Powered by FreeBSD" GIF to
PNG and the PNG version is a bit smaller:

-rw-r--r--   1 question  wheel    5279 Jan 20  2003 powerlogo.gif
-rw-r--r--   1 question  wheel    4957 Jan 20  2003 powerlogo.png

IIRC, I used the gif2png port to do the conversion. The only JPEG file
that I have for my site that I converted to PNG was done through GIMP.
I'm not sure if or what port(s) are available for the JPEG->PNG
conversion.

# If a browser doesn't support .png today... well, I can live with not
# supporting that browser then :-).

heh... yeah, I wouldn't worry about many people browsing the FreeBSD
websites using Sun's Java web browser that they had a while ago :)

# Hmm, well if it's only the powerani.gif image that needs to be converted
# then it sounds like MNG is better than nothing.

<nods /> At least it will show that the project continues to push for
open standards and open formats :)

# At first I though it would be a bad idea to rename the diretory... but
# the I had a look at the content of the diretory :
# 
# [simon at zaphod:gifs] du -ck . | tail -n 1
# 3680    total
# [simon at zaphod:gifs] du -ck *.jpg *.gif | tail -n 1
# 3256    total
# [simon at zaphod:gifs] du -ck *.png | tail -n 1
# 250     total
# 
# So it's the main part of the directory that needs to be replaced anyway,
# so it wouldn't really hurt much (in wasted repository space) to rename
# the directory at the same time as we convert the images.  So, I'm also
# for renaming the directory and 'img' seems as good a name as any to me.

I was a bit nervous after I wrote the directory rename bit and after I
sent out the message :D

I like and use "img" since it's fairly neutral.

-- 
Linh Pham                                         question at closedsrc.org
Webmaster and FreeBSD Geek                          http://closedsrc.org
Apprentice Manager Editor and Writer           http://www.daemonnews.org
C++ is to C, as lung cancer is to lung  |  There is always one more bug.
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