FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

An issue that greatly affects bandwidth both on the server and for individuals accessing it.

A 1920 X 1080 screenshot in PNG format is on average 1500 Kb in size.
The same image in JPG format on average is a little over 200 Kb in size.

People use the excuse that PNG format is Free Open Source but it's a rubbish format that has poor pixel shading and even worse compression. The improvements to this format in the last 20 years have been minimal, almost nonexistent. It's still not much better that the old GIF format.

The JPG format (jpeg) has seen extensive development still being continued around the world and is today considered to be Public Domain except by a couple of US based money-grubbers with no true legal basis for their claims.

From Wikipedia:

"The JPEG committee investigated the patent claims in 2002 and were of the opinion that they were invalidated by prior art."

"In February 2006, the United States Patent and Trademark Office agreed to re-examine Forgent's JPEG patent at the request of the Public Patent Foundation. On May 26, 2006 the USPTO found the patent invalid based on prior art. The USPTO also found that Forgent knew about the prior art, and did not tell the Patent Office, making any appeal to reinstate the patent highly unlikely to succeed."

The same thing is happening again now, once again only in the United States, by a company called Princeton Digital Image Corporation. Another quote from Wikipedia:

"The patent was originally owned and assigned to General Electric. The patent expired in December 2007."

"Court records indicate that it (General Electric) assigned the patent to Princeton in 2009 and retains certain rights in the patent."

I don't pretend to understand the legal system in the US, but anywhere else in the world it looks like the equivalent of large companies trying to sell the Sydney Harbour Bridge or the Washington Monument.

There's plenty of Free Open Source Software that utilises the JPEG format with no mention of licensing concerns, including GIMP and Python scripts for the Apache server software.

The only way these money-grubbers can succeed is if we let them. Its the same deal with MP3, the basic MP3 decoding and encoding technology is patent-free in the European Union and most of the rest of the world but that hasn't stopped a large US based corporation from trying to rip people off.

Food for thought.

Cheers,

Andrew.

Thanks MineYoshi,

I never noticed that thread before.

The reason I posted is because I live in a remote area with very slow and very expensive internet. Because of all the PNG files I can't afford to open the Screenshots page, too many Mb's and too slow. Must cause extra expense for the Forum's server host as well.

Cheers,

Andrew.

Well, anyways i better something expensive with the best quality, that a cheap thing with bad quality1

Keep that in mind =D!

JPG also losses quality. For most Minetest screenshots however, a JPG is okay.
Try using these:
https://developer.chrome.com/multidevic ... ompression
http://www.howtogeek.com/181567/how-to- ... martphone/

PNG images are also compressed, without data loss, with zlib, based on bytes redundancy. So that's nearny inefficient on photos, because every pixel has a different color. But here on minetest screenshots, many adjacent pixels have the same color, so the compression may not be that bad.
JPEG is better adapted for photos. It uses a very efficient compression but with loss of quality. The disadvantage is that it creates some chaotic blurred zones. It usually goes unnoticed for a real photo, but a minetest screenshot is not the same picture style, and this may be visible. There is still different quality levels. Obviously the lowest will give an ugly image. I don't know whether the highest levels are acceptable or not. It's up to you to see.

For the blocks textures, using the JPEG format is inconceivable. It's adapted for big images, and the for a tiny 16x16 image, these "blurred zones" would take the whole image.

l found this at erlehmann's website l think:
http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/35634.html

This is my experience of this 2 image types:

JPG/JPEG:
Quality loss after every time you are editing
No transparent
Blurry details
Using less space / ram


PNG:
Do not lose quality after editing
Transparent
Make the image exactly how you want it
Using more space / ram

PNG is a lot more used by programs and webpages then jpg
JPG/JPEG should not be used in games :-)

its worth the small difference

this should be the sufficient proof, png is the best for minetest, see the test:

I just opened,saved and closed each image in a image editor (mspaint) 10 times, see what happened:

The png image is still exactly the same, but not the jpg

UjEdwin wrote:This is my experience of this 2 image types:

JPG/JPEG:
Quality loss after every time you are editing
No transparent
Blurry details
Using less space / ram


PNG:
Do not lose quality after editing
Transparent
Make the image exactly how you want it
Using more space / ram

PNG is a lot more used by programs and webpages then jpg
JPG/JPEG should not be used in games :-)

its worth the small difference

this should be the sufficient proof, png is the best for minetest, see the test:

I just opened,saved and closed each image in a image editor (mspaint) 10 times, see what happened:

The png image is still exactly the same, but not the jpg

This is a closed case, simply everyone here knows the fact that PNG wins here, everyone chooses quality instead of price, maybe PNG is slower to upload sometimes, but gives better quality, something that we need here!
Good quality in textures and screenshots!

Also there is a post with the same theme in the "Feature Discussion" , better don't make this post more long!

You can get data compression proxy add ons for browser. They will reduce the size of the website before sending it to you.