HEIC encoding buggy

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nji9
Posts: 131
Joined: Wed May 13, 2020 10:33 am

HEIC encoding buggy

Post by nji9 »

First of all the heic format seems not capable to true lossless encoding.
I tried to find out, but not being a prof on that I wasn't successful.
However my "reference" for graphic is GIMP, and in its export dialog
for heic it says "(nearly) lossless".
(BTW This expression seems rather sensless to me,
as the saying "a miss is as good as a mile" says,
if just one bit is different than you shouldn't use the word lossless at all.
"Nearly lossless" makes no sense).
Maybe you check the format's properties?
And then change to "nearly lossless" too, or better leave it completely.
But that's only the minor thing.

The big bug with xnviewmp's heic encoding is that the encoding quality
doesn't match the option slider's setting.
If you use the max value (100 (= "lossless") and compare that to the
heic file that GIMP produces with its max value,
you see that xnview's file size is much smaller than GIMP's
and that the resulting quality is very poor compared to GIMP's.
This means that your encoder is very poor even with its max settings,
or that there is a bug in using the encoder.
If you can't help that, the best thing would be to do something
like a "half slider" (max value = "50"), and tag 50 as "still not good"
or something like that.
To my opinion.

I attach the two arithmetical differences from the original 24bit image
to a heic file encoded by XnViewMP and a heic file encoded by GIMP.
If you split the files to HSV channels you see the BIG difference.
Attachments
difference_orig_gimp.png
difference_orig_xnview.png
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xnview
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Re: HEIC encoding buggy

Post by xnview »

could you send me original and output?
Pierre.
nji9
Posts: 131
Joined: Wed May 13, 2020 10:33 am

Re: HEIC encoding buggy

Post by nji9 »

Sorry, attchment size limit doesn't allow.
It was just to demonstrate anyway.
Why don't you use an arbitrary file by yourself?
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xnview
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Re: HEIC encoding buggy

Post by xnview »

you can send them by mail
Pierre.
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xnview
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Re: HEIC encoding buggy

Post by xnview »

:bugconfirmed: Thanks to your detailed description I can reproduce the problem.
Pierre.
nji9
Posts: 131
Joined: Wed May 13, 2020 10:33 am

Re: HEIC encoding buggy

Post by nji9 »

Glad I could help.

However I'm surprised by the classification of it as "minor" bug.
(Was it a "minor" effort for you to kill that bug?)

All the users that trusted on the lossless encoding of heic and jxl
viewtopic.php?p=180706#p180706
have lost their originals now, even without knowing about it.
That's severe I might think.
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xnview
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Re: HEIC encoding buggy

Post by xnview »

i don't use classification...
Pierre.
nji9
Posts: 131
Joined: Wed May 13, 2020 10:33 am

Re: HEIC encoding buggy

Post by nji9 »

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xnview
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Re: HEIC encoding buggy

Post by xnview »

This problem is supposed to be fixed in XnView MP 1.3.1. Please check and confirm the bug fix here.
Pierre.
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