freesoftwaremagazine.com— Patents for the GIF format, once claimed as the exclusive property of Unisys, will shortly expire - restoring GIF to its once prominent position in the open source world.
Sep 28, 2006View in Crawl 4
>> Load up the gimp (or Photoshop, or whatever), take any image, >> set it to indexed and save copies as GIF and PNG. The PNG will >> be noticeably smaller. Try it.I have, and that's absolutely not true. I'd say for small images it's about 80/20 in favor of GIF, with that figure steadily reversing as the image gets larger. But due to differences in how the algos work you can quite easily produce images that will not compress well with PNG.
I just tested this theory in Photoshop and found it not to be entirely true. I started with a 500x500px image, drew squigly lines in 2 different colours, then used save for web to test the difference. I mucked with a bunch of the settings(both using 8-bit colour space), changing each one to maintain the same settings in each of the different formats and found that GIF was often smaller then the PNG. If for a given setting PNG was smaller it wasn't by more then a kilobyte. I know it's not scientific, but it does disprove the theory that PNG will always be smaller then GIF when using the same bit depth.
@jonnyq"has exactly the same features as GIF" .. PNG doesn't support animation, GIF does. There is MNG but MNG is not widely supported and it's not PNG.
What i don't get is why people digg down the parent for asking a very legit question.Not everyone has been developing on this Interweb thing since before there were Tubes ya know...
Te patent was already expired. Read the Wikipedia page on GIF.Quote:On June 20, 2003, the United States patent on the LZW algorithm expired [3], which means that Unisys can no longer collect royalties for use of the GIF format in that country. Those bothered by the patent enforcement dubbed this day GIF Liberation Day. The equivalent patents in Europe and Japan expired on June 18 and June 20, 2004 respectively, with the Canadian patent following on July 7.
Wow, the parent got -131 diggs for just saying something that was correct. Gotta love this social networking thingy.not really a solution because of its abyssmal support, but there are animated PNG formats: MNG and APNG.Also, if you actually RTFPatent:"Unisys U.S. LZW Patent No. 4,558,302 expired on June 20, 2003, the counterpart patents in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy expired on June 18, 2004, the Japanese counterpart patents expired on June 20, 2004 and the counterpart Canadian patent expired on July 7, 2004. "
cal01Sep 28, 2006
Now that .gif is free, is it possible to change the algorithmn/format to support more colors?
siroccoSep 28, 2006
>> Load up the gimp (or Photoshop, or whatever), take any image, >> set it to indexed and save copies as GIF and PNG. The PNG will >> be noticeably smaller. Try it.I have, and that's absolutely not true. I'd say for small images it's about 80/20 in favor of GIF, with that figure steadily reversing as the image gets larger. But due to differences in how the algos work you can quite easily produce images that will not compress well with PNG.
modsuperstarSep 28, 2006
I just tested this theory in Photoshop and found it not to be entirely true. I started with a 500x500px image, drew squigly lines in 2 different colours, then used save for web to test the difference. I mucked with a bunch of the settings(both using 8-bit colour space), changing each one to maintain the same settings in each of the different formats and found that GIF was often smaller then the PNG. If for a given setting PNG was smaller it wasn't by more then a kilobyte. I know it's not scientific, but it does disprove the theory that PNG will always be smaller then GIF when using the same bit depth.
orangetideSep 28, 2006
@jonnyq"has exactly the same features as GIF" .. PNG doesn't support animation, GIF does. There is MNG but MNG is not widely supported and it's not PNG.
mikeroysoftSep 28, 2006
What i don't get is why people digg down the parent for asking a very legit question.Not everyone has been developing on this Interweb thing since before there were Tubes ya know...
cherrytzorsSep 28, 2006
It wasn't free?
av1dSep 29, 2006
Te patent was already expired. Read the Wikipedia page on GIF.Quote:On June 20, 2003, the United States patent on the LZW algorithm expired [3], which means that Unisys can no longer collect royalties for use of the GIF format in that country. Those bothered by the patent enforcement dubbed this day GIF Liberation Day. The equivalent patents in Europe and Japan expired on June 18 and June 20, 2004 respectively, with the Canadian patent following on July 7.
spadgosSep 29, 2006
Wow, the parent got -131 diggs for just saying something that was correct. Gotta love this social networking thingy.not really a solution because of its abyssmal support, but there are animated PNG formats: MNG and APNG.Also, if you actually RTFPatent:"Unisys U.S. LZW Patent No. 4,558,302 expired on June 20, 2003, the counterpart patents in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy expired on June 18, 2004, the Japanese counterpart patents expired on June 20, 2004 and the counterpart Canadian patent expired on July 7, 2004. "
chieffySep 29, 2006
No. It wasn't free to use as you see fit, unrestricted by patents etc. RTA.
Closed AccountJan 2, 2009
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