this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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if you could standardise a file format for a specific task what would you pick and why (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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if you could pick a standard format for a purpose what would it be and why?

e.g. flac for lossless audio because...

(yes you can add new categories)

summary:

  1. photos .jxl
  2. open domain image data .exr
  3. videos .av1
  4. lossless audio .flac
  5. lossy audio .opus
  6. subtitles srt/ass
  7. fonts .otf
  8. container mkv (doesnt contain .jxl)
  9. plain text utf-8 (many also say markup but disagree on the implementation)
  10. documents .odt
  11. archive files (this one is causing a bloodbath so i picked randomly) .tar.zst
  12. configuration files toml
  13. typesetting typst
  14. interchange format .ora
  15. models .gltf / .glb
  16. daw session files .dawproject
  17. otdr measurement results .xml
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[–] [email protected] 88 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (38 children)

This is the kind of thing i think about all the time so i have a few.

  • Archive files: .tar.zst
    • Produces better compression ratios than the DEFLATE compression algorithm (used by .zip and gzip/.gz) and does so faster.
    • By separating the jobs of archiving (.tar), compressing (.zst), and (if you so choose) encrypting (.gpg), .tar.zst follows the Unix philosophy of "Make each program do one thing well.".
    • .tar.xz is also very good and seems more popular (probably since it was released 6 years earlier in 2009), but, when tuned to it's maximum compression level, .tar.zst can achieve a compression ratio pretty close to LZMA (used by .tar.xz and .7z) and do it faster^1.

      zstd and xz trade blows in their compression ratio. Recompressing all packages to zstd with our options yields a total ~0.8% increase in package size on all of our packages combined, but the decompression time for all packages saw a ~1300% speedup.

  • Image files: JPEG XL/.jxl
    • "Why JPEG XL"
    • Free and open format.
    • Can handle lossy images, lossless images, images with transparency, images with layers, and animated images, giving it the potential of being a universal image format.
    • Much better quality and compression efficiency than current lossy and lossless image formats (.jpeg, .png, .gif).
    • Produces much smaller files for lossless images than AVIF^2
    • Supports much larger resolutions than AVIF's 9-megapixel limit (important for lossless images).
    • Supports up to 24-bit color depth, much more than AVIF's 12-bit color depth limit (which, to be fair, is probably good enough).
  • Videos (Codec): AV1
    • Free and open format.
    • Much more efficient than x264 (used by .mp4) and VP9^3.
  • Documents: OpenDocument / ODF / .odt

    it’s already a NATO standard for documents Because the Microsoft Word ones (.doc, .docx) are unusable outside the Microsoft Office ecosystem. I feel outraged every time I need to edit .docx file because it breaks the layout easily. And some older .doc files cannot even work with Microsoft Word.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Damn didn't realize that JXL was such a big deal. That whole JPEG recompression actually seems pretty damn cool as well. There was some noise about GNOME starting to make use of JXL in their ecosystem too...

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