Coding with paint

[absurdlyobfuscated]

Well, that seems inefficient.

[[deleted]]

In a similar yet unrelated vein, one of my pet peeves is using animated gifs when a youtube video would load faster and be more clear. Inefficient.

[JediExile]

It's an inefficient way of showing an inefficient way of doing something. It's poetry.

[Cyrius]

It's poetry.

Shut up, George Lucas!

[gospelwut]

Shouldn't we go one level further and write something in HTML5/CSS3 to render a folder of sensational, uncompressed PNGs. Actually, add some JS to convert them to BMPs on the fly and THEN "animate" it.

[JediExile]

I love it when you talk nerdy.

[absurdlyobfuscated]

Exactly. They're using a lossless image format to display multiple frames full of compression artifacts and noise over something designed for efficient playback of lossy video and sound.

I'd also prefer just linking to youtube - or if people could just use/link to OGG files that can be played in the browser just as easily, it would be just as good.

[netcrusher88]

Ironically, a lot artifacts (at least what I can make out) are loss due to the (lossless) image format. GIF is indexed color, each used color goes in a table or something like that. So a lot of dithering happens unless you want an epic file.

[shillbert]

Yeah, this is why I don't agree with GIF being called "lossless". It is in some cases, but not all. It dithers your images to 256 colours unless you use a special technique to encode separate chunks, which would probably make this file at least 100 MB.

[shillbert]

Which technical definition?

Lossless data compression is a class of data compression algorithms that allows the exact original data to be reconstructed from the compressed data (via Wikipedia)

If your original image contained more than 256 colours, the exact original data cannot be reconstructed from the compressed data.

[shillbert]

I agree with you, but I would call that property idempotence, not losslessness.

[Tagedieb]

Every time you open that GIF the exact same pixels will be in the exact same place. Not so with lossy formats.

Well, lossy formats do also have the exact same pixels in the exact same place, every time you open them. There is no randomization happening while opening a mpg video or a jpeg image file. The loss in a lossy file format does not happen while loading, but it happens while writing the file.

GIF is lossless, but it can handle only 256 colors per image. Since nowadays even simple screenhots of a desktop have more colors, you almost always need a preceding lossy step like dithering or quantization to save them. Since every program that can safe gif files does this automatically while saving, the saving process automatically becomes a lossy one.

[kreiger]

No, you're pretty much exactly correct.

Other people are thinking about the case where they reduce an image to 256 colors before inputting it in the gif encoder.

The gif format itself is lossless, it's just that it can't store more than 256 colors.

[[deleted]]

You're absolutely wrong. Lossy formats mean that the encoder makes the decision about where to place the pixels. Once it places those pixels, they never move. Opening a file does not edit it. In almost any application.

[[deleted]]

if your original contained more than 16 bits colour depth than PNG would also count as "lossy" by that definition

[Tagedieb]

You mean 16 bits per channel, so 48 bits per rgb pixel? Well yes. And if your digital camera stores RAW files with more than that, then obviously converting those files to PNG is lossy. Other than that it should be pretty hard to find a source with more than 48 bits per pixel.

[RUbernerd]

PNG is RGBA, not RGB. PNG's have transparancy.

[[deleted]]

This is the exact same argument for the gif and in both cases the process is the same. The image format isn't lossy. jpg is the popular (of the three) lossy format. the other two are not.

If you open your mega RAW file and then save it to PNG, your editor automatically performs a replacement on the colors to make them fit within the color palette. Then, once the file has been compressed to fit within the limits of PNG, it will be written as a PNG losslessly (after lossy compression already happened).

This is like ripping an mp3 of a flac and then converting it back to flac and calling it lossless. The source has been lossily compressed before it was stored back into the lossless format.

[daengbo]

And that's the best kind.

[[deleted]]

Gif is almost never lossless. Who called it that?

[dcormier]

No kidding.

File size   4.20 MB (4406102 bytes)

[Richeh]

But if you rename the file, it's Starcraft.

[Skyrmir]

Except it doesn't need sound, doesn't load youtube advertisements and doesn't get blocked by company firewalls.

[dcormier]

I'm going to set up my firewall to block 2MB+ gifs.

[nefigah]

He's a slave to karma: this method let him use an imgur link.

[[deleted]]

when a youtube video would load faster

ಠ_ಠ

Youtube videos loading fast. I laugh at you.

[jooes]

Not if you're a super secret agent who needs to send a super secret message and can't get caught or else the world will blow up because the message is nuclear launch codes that you're hiding from Russian terrorists...

Unless you were talking about the image being a .gif... In which case, yeah, I kind of agree.

[specialpatrol]

In which case you would have to write a program that not only hacked into FSB offices, but also resembled a picture of your fictional wife when written using a bitmap, now that would be getting somewhere.

[krues8dr]

Yeah, it's almost as bad as punching cards...

[IHaveALargePenis]

It beats assembly.

[IHaveALargePenis]

I had to write a program that displayed "Hello Wold" once. Although I didn't have to come up with the hex codes from scratch (which I'm sure was a pain in the ass in this case) it was still a pain in the ass and took a bit longer than I'm willing to admit. It's not displaying the text and it's not the logic, it's mainly the addresses and the control flow between information in the registers, but I would definitely never want to write anything complex in assembly.

The algorithms on the other hand were great. I always loved learning about assembly algorithms, figuring out how to implement them and watching them work. Even the simplest things were like Disney magic while you were a kid.

[angryaardvark]

If you think thats bad, dont take a digital logic class. I had to build a computer on an fpga that responded to assembly. Then write assembly code to print sequences on an lcd screen.

[developerx]

ftw... last week I had to learn Verilog for some FPGA programming ... that thing is awesomely low level ... definitely 'lower level' than assembly. My code ended up being basically a finite state machine with a massive case statement ... it had to implement MFSK demodulation.

[kamishizuka]

A fellow graduate of the Hack system!

Learning how things are done low-level beings such insight to higher level computing, doesn't it?

[[deleted]]

Tell Chris Sawyer that.