Oscar Smith

This is a really bad lossy format as specified. 4 bit RGBA is going to look awful. I think that any good form of lossless compression will need fairly complicated...

For screenshots, it's surprisingly OK. The main problem will be things like gradients and faces.

Yeah, that's a pretty clear example. The equivalent JPEG will be around the same size with no noticeable quality loss.

One approach that might be a lot better would be to store exact pixels diffs if the pixels are close, and only shift out data if the 8 bit opcodes...

The main downside of this is that it doesn't work well with a streaming encoder/decoder..

that would work, but it is strictly harder for streaming encoders.

I doubt that a qoi-like technique will work for video compression. Video is formats like H264/AV1 throw away so much data that it's easy to forget how big video would...

what is QOI_8_LINEAR_RGB_16? I don't understand the description.

It exists for C, python, C#, Java, and javascript, Rust, and Go (and a ton more). Is there a specific language you're worried about?

for 10 and higher bitrate images, I have a few ideas of potentially good opcodes. we can save a bunch of opcode space by removing qoi index and run length....