Yea … no, sorry to say but this one’s on Microsoft. I get it, hurr durr Apple expensive and elitist, but they know where to put up their walled garden and where not to. For example they used to have their own video container .mov but they’re way past forcing something like that onto iPhone users. And even back then, the actual codec they committed themselves to in those days was H.264, a standard that’s open to adoption by anybody. You can easily turn an old .mov into an .mp4 or .mkv without needing to alter the actual content of the file and that content is playable by pretty much every media device built in the last 15+ years.
HEIC isn’t Apple’s thing it’s from the MPEGroup, also easily licensable by anybody. I guess the reason why it wasn’t part of Windows 10 from the beginning is because they both came out in mid 2015. Windows 10 seems to have adopted it for viewing (and later editing) in 2018 but they make you hit a stupid download button in their store to get it so that’s lame.
deranger@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
You install an app to get the codec, then you’re done. Same as HEVC video which is used very commonly in piracy. Are pirates out to make it “purposefully painful” or are they just using modern codecs?
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 3 days ago
Yeah it’s a bit of a tossup between them. Apple definitely chose it to be a dick. However, Microsoft could rectify it easily if they wanted to.
Both HEVC and HEIC thought cost money, and the vast majority of windows users will never use the codecs. Including the license with every copy of Windows is added cost to the end user that they receive no benefit from, so I understand why they would leave it out. HEVC prompts you if you try to play to go to the store and buy the license, which is good for your entire account. Honestly it’s not a terrible thing to do. I was one of the 1% of people who would play HEVC natively on Windows, so yeah the $3 license made sense
deranger@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
What other image format supports HDR and modern compression algorithms? AVIF also requires a special codec. This is just codec stuff, I really don’t see it as anyone being a dick. Android can also use these modern formats, with the same requirements if you want to open them on Windows.
Kinda blows my mind people so frequently recommend using Linux here, yet taking 30 seconds to install a free codec on Windows is apparently a big deal.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 3 days ago
I literally said it was easy to do.
barsoap@lemm.ee 2 days ago
OpenEXR. Though it probably could use a spec upgrade, in particular add JPEG-XL to the list of compression algorithms. It’s not like OpenEXR’s choices are bad, the lossy ones are just more geared towards fidelity than space savings.
Bonus: Supports multi-channel, so not just RGBA. Not terribly useful for your run off the mill camera, very useful in production where you might want to attach the depth buffer, cryptomatte etc and I guess you could also use it for the output of light field cameras. Oh there’s also multi-view so you can store not just stereo images but also whole all-around captures and stuff. There’s practically nothing pixel-related you can’t do with it though it might require custom tooling.
Sparky@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
Here’s the free oem app as an msix package as Microsoft removed the store link. link
(yes I did accidentally upload it to the wrong collection, but I don’t think I can change that)