farbfeld

farbfeld is a lossless image format which is easy to parse, pipe and
compress.
It has the following format:

| Bytes | Description |
|--------|------------------------------------------------------------|
| 8 | "farbfeld" magic value |
| 4 | 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (width) |
| 4 | 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (height) |
| [2222] | 4⋅16-Bit BE unsigned integers [RGBA] / pixel, row-aligned |

http://tools.suckless.org/farbfeld/

>>45

Yeah, and it's especially clever to put the format identifier behind the compression, so that you need to decompress the beginning of each file to get its real file type, or duplicate that information in some ad hoc unreliable way like using file extensions.

That's a good point. It would be nice to be able to read some details off the file without performing any complex code like decompression.

It's also pretty clever to force the use of generic compression algorithms instead of much more efficient specialized algorithms for lossless image compression.

Could someone show the tradeoff? I thought bzip2 of raw image files was competitive with PNG?