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This is a great project, but personally I feel that there are lots of uses for uncompressed images (ie. random access, ready to render straight away), and lots of uses for well compressed lossless, but little use for 'slightly compressed' images.

The normal argument for 'slightly compressed' images is that they can be decompressed with very few CPU cycles, but the reality is that with modern platforms lossless image en/decoding is done in hardware and therefore pretty much 'free', as long as you pick lossless h264, lossless webp or lossless hevc. All of those things will also give much smaller file sizes.

In the few places where hardware decode isn't a thing (eg. the memory-constrained 8 bit microcontroller decoding the boot screen for your IoT toaster), there usually isn't a need for losslessness.




“Slightly compressed” is heavily used in 3D graphics -- see ETC2, DXT, etc.

It’s useful because the size savings apply in memory, because decompression is so cheap it can be done on the fly.

It has to be lossy because you want a guaranteed fixed-rate compression ratio (eg 4x) and there’s no way to do that losslessly.




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