[Newbies] Reading PNG images into squeak image is slow

[Ben Coman]

Levente Uzonyi wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Oct 2013, Ben Coman wrote:
>
>> Levente Uzonyi wrote:
>>> On Tue, 22 Oct 2013, Mateusz Grotek wrote:
>>>
>>>> It is (even on Cog).
>>>> What is the reason for that?
>>>> Is it a problem with the algorithm used in the image or it's 
>>>> unsolvable
>>>> inside the image and a plugin or FFI is needed.
>>>
>>> I doubt it can be significantly faster using smalltalk only. When we 
>>> wanted to store images in files using lossless compression, we 
>>> decided to use jpeg instead of png, because it has plugin support, 
>>> so it's a lot faster to load and save the images.
>> That sounds contradictory since JPEG is not lossless (I know you 
>> know, just stating the obvious).  For computer generated images with 
>> solid blocks of colour JPEG can have artifacts. PNG is lossless.  In 
>> general, photo=JPEG, graphics=PNG.
>
> You have to set the quality parameter to 100 to get a lossless image. 
> The only drawback versus png is that it only supports three channels, 
> so there will be no alpha channel in those images. But that was not a 
> problem for us.

Thats interesting. I'd never heard of that.  I always believed 100 was 
still lossless per [1] [2].  What software did you use for the lossless 
JPEG encoding? 
cheers -ben

[1] 
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7982409/is-jpeg-lossless-when-quality-is-set-to-100
[2] 
http://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/19876/converting-raw-images-to-lossless-jpeg-using-gimp

>
>
> Levente
>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> P.S.
>>>>
>>>> Code:
>>>> (PNGReadWriter formFromFileNamed: something) durationToRun 
>>>> "0:00:01:09.591"
>>>> "unacceptale if you want to program an image browser"
>>>>
>>>> Data:
>>>> 1301.png: PNG image data, 2048 x 1536, 8-bit/color RGB, non-interlaced
>>>> (a pic of a street taken from a cell phone)
>>>
>>> That image is huge. Cell phones and digital cameras usually create 
>>> jpeg images. But if you really need to support png, then ffi or a 
>>> plugin is the way to go.
>> I believe this is because a higher level of compression would take 
>> longer and use more battery.  You can use http://www.xnview.com/
>> to often drop 80% of the file size of of cell phone images without 
>> any apparent loss of quality.
>
> If that is a concern, then I'm pretty sure these machines have 
> hardware which can compress the images. The do have it for video 
> (mpeg2/h264), so adding jpeg is basically no extra cost.
>
> On the other hand, I don't think creating a png file is 
> computationally less expensive, than creating a jpeg file.
>
>
> Levente
>
>>
>> -ben
>>>
>>>
>>> Levente
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________