social.noyu.me

apologies to everyone who grew up on the internet for the realisation this might give you

this isn’t even a joke (aside from the part about being obnoxious to someone who likes vinyl, I wouldn’t actually do that), I think this is something image quality comparisons fail to account for: if you’re anything like me, JPEG looks better because it’s worse

I’m not even sure how much of it is familiarity and nostalgia, and how much of it is universal. the blocking artifacts add extra high-frequency information that does literally make the image less blurry, just in an inauthentic way. it’s kinda like adding fake film grain

@hikari I'd say it's almost universal. The "sharpness" control on televisions has been around a long time and it generally makes things look sharper while losing some actual detail.

@hikari Apple’s upscaling algorithm for zooming in on photos frequently makes me think a photo is nicer than its pixels actually show.

@hikari Also all those examples of how pixel sprites look on CRTs

@hikari Fascinating. I have noticed the blurriness issue myself. My guess is that it is caused by converter tools using PSNR as a quality metric. For video, x264 solved this by using SSIM instead.

@hikari I frequently find myself back to this Brian Eno quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/649039-whatever-you-now-find-weird-ugly-uncomfortable-and-nasty-about

@chiguire @hikari oh wow, that’s a great quote. Thanks for sharing

@jerryorr Thanks! Not sure why it caught on months after I replied xD

@hikari https://xkcd.com/598/ ;)

Haven't noticed it myself, but it does make sense that one gets used to the "style" of artifacts.

I wonder if we are going to get this with the image optimization algorithms in cameras too - people insisting that e.g. 2016 iPhone sharpening/fake bokeh/… just looked *better*?

@HeNeArXn oh I’m certain of that. for sharpening, it could even be for the same reason (adds high-frequency information)

@hikari I'm among other things a music producer and there are plugins that can add audio codec artifacts artificially. My nostalgia is not vinyl crackle but high-end slightly mangled through mpeg-2 layer III

@hikari me: i hate the blocking artifacts in JPEG and MPEG and i will not settle for anything other than 100% quality JPEG even if the resulting image is 15MB large
also me: i like cassettes

@instereo256 every perspective is subjective~ 🎶

@hikari you might appreciate:

@delroth@delroth.net that’s beautiful, thanks so much

@hikari ok blocking artefacts are a bridge too far, but tiny sensor aggressively sharpened crunch is great…

@hikari raaawr~

@hikari @hikari png or lossless jxl webp is google

@roboneko @hikari we use WebP for many reasons, including the fact that an animated WebP of higher resolution than an animated GIF or APNG often takes up fewer bytes on disk than either of the other formats. it’s just more efficient.

@hikari @arcana @hikari gif and apng are lossless tho so that is apples to oranges

but yeah, if you want lossy animations and want to avoid mp4 with h.264 or h.265 for whatever reason then webp makes sense. why not just use mp4 tho?

@hikari @arcana @hikari oh huh nvm TIL that webp can do lossless as well. fair enough I guess. still not a huge fan because google tho

@roboneko @hikari yeah i was referring to the lossless compression ratio of WebP. and as much as I despise Google, I don’t mind using any corporation’s open source projects. At the end of the day, WebP is useful for several other reasons relating to some of the full stack tech I use. but i was deffo just referring to the file format itself.

@roboneko @arcana practically speaking neither GIF nor APNG are lossless when used as a video codec, which is what most online GIFs are

@hikari @hikari @arcana isn't that purely a matter of how you go about the initial encoding though? nothing inherent to the format itself

@roboneko @arcana I guess so for APNG. GIF definitely can’t losslessly represent video with more than 256 colours though

@hikari @hikari @arcana @pomstan fair point. gif was good at what it was good at and is clearly outdated at this point

webp just doesn't sit well with me because for adding yet another format that's going to stick around forever it doesn't feel like we got all that much. meanwhile it extends google's control to yet another standard

compare to jxl technical capabilities (canvas size, channels, etc) and upgrade path (existing jpg can be converted and downgraded without reencoding). in which case it at least feels to me like worthwhile technical benefits and convergence for the cost of adding another standard to the mix

@roboneko @arcana @hikari

gif is lossless

…what?

@pomstan@xn–p1abe3d.xn–80asehdb @roboneko @arcana GIF is the spiritual predecessor of PNG, it doesn’t apply lossy compression

@hikari @roboneko @arcana

lossy compression

that’s not what was said in the post i was replying to. gif is only “lossless” if you have <255 colors in your original picture

@pomstan@xn–p1abe3d.xn–80asehdb @roboneko @arcana sorry yeah I was struggling to keep up with all these subthreads, I actually argued the same thing you’re saying in another subthread

@hikari does an audiophile want to have sex with audio?

@hikari we like to listen to vinyl because it is a more active and experiential form of listening. vinyl does have superior audio quality to CDs, but it is an entirely different medium. improper care for vinyl is actaully what causes the “fuzz” that people equate with a signature sound quality of vinyl. that is not he original, nor the intended, state of a record.

however, as something of audiophiles ourselves, we will 100% admit that FLAC files offer superior sound quality when of sufficient sample rate and bit depth, and require no such delicacy in caring for them. DSD files are also interesting and are recorded in a manner similar to the way a vinyl record is etched. very fascinating.

so our use of vinyl is for three primary reasons:

1. we like to support independent artists by purchasing physical media when possible, and quite frankly, vinyl recording packages look fucking dope. and limited edition colored vinly pressings are very pretty.
2. as mentioned: it is experiential. we have heightened sensory centers due in no small part to autism. by engaging with a tactile form of an auditory input, we feel more engaged.
3. listening to records while working from home encourages us to actually get up, since we have to just to flip the record to the alternate side or place a new one on the turntable.

@arcana sure. I want to be clear that the vinyl part of my post was the setup to a joke, I think there’s nothing wrong with listening to vinyl records and they’re beautiful in their own way

@hikari based. keep slaying, hikari.

@hikari Saving them jay pegs under PNG so you can be sure of how the artifacts look.

@hikari It's not worse than CD, but the dynamic range is definitely more limited (grooves can only go this deep). Because of that the records were to be mixed and mastered differently for vinyl. It's not about hisses and scratches, they do sound differently. But it's not the case with modern records which are mastered for digital, then compressed further for the vinyl — that's what happens most of the time and it just sounds bad.
Same for JPEG I guess, let's not forget that JPEG was designed by photography experts, not by some tech guys trying to save on bandwidth for the infamous surveillance enterprise 😅

@hikari

@hikari no webp artefacts look objectively worse and I will take that to my grave

@hikari technically vinyl is more different that just being analog - the way music is mixed for vinyl is different, so a song released on vinyl and digital will sound different, even before they are compressed and encoded onto the format.