FLIF: Free Lossless Image Format

FLIF is a lossless image format based on MANIAC compression. MANIAC (Meta-Adaptive Near-zero Integer Arithmetic Coding) is a variant of CABAC (context-adaptive binary arithmetic coding), where the contexts are nodes of decision trees which are dynamically learned at encode time.

FLIF outperforms PNG, FFV1, lossless WebP, lossless BPG and lossless JPEG2000 in terms of compression ratio.

Moreover, FLIF supports a form of progressive interlacing (essentially a generalization/improvement of PNG's Adam7) which means that any prefix (e.g. partial download) of a compressed file can be used as a reasonable lossy encoding of the entire image.

For more information on FLIF, visit http://flif.info

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License

FLIF is copylefted free/libre software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it, provided that you share back.

The reference implementation of FLIF is released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License version 3 or later (LGPLv3+).

The decoder library libflif_dec is released under a weaker, non-copyleft free software license: the Apache 2.0 license.

The example application viewflif illustrates how to use the decode library. The example code in viewflif.c is in the public domain (Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal).

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Build Instructions

GNU/Linux

Install the dependencies

On Debian:

• for the encoder/decoder: sudo apt-get install libpng-dev
• for the viewer: sudo apt-get install libsdl2-dev

On Fedora:

• for the encoder/decoder: sudo dnf install libpng-devel
• for the viewer: sudo dnf install SDL-devel

Compile

• Navigate to the FLIF/src directory and run make to compile everything, or
  • make flif to build just the flif command line tool
  • make libflif.so to build the GPL'ed shared library
  • make libflif_dec.so to build the LGPL'ed decode-only shared library
  • make viewflif to build the example viewer (it depends on the decode library)

Install

• sudo make install if you want to install it globally

Windows

• Install Visual Studio (VS Community 2015 is free for open source projects)
• Open the build\MSVC folder and double-click the dl_make_vs.bat file. This will download required libraries and run nmake to build flif.exe. Then, run in the command line:
  • nmake libflif.dll to build the shared library
  • nmake viewflif.exe to build the example viewer

OS X

• Install homebrew
• Install the dependencies: brew install pkg-config libpng sdl2
• Run make in the FLIF/src directory

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Pre-Built Binaries

These will be available on the Release page

• https://github.com/FLIF-hub/FLIF/releases

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Related Projects

• Poly FLIF - A javascript polyfill that allows you to use FLIF files in the browser. (Demo)
• UGUI: FLIF - A GUI that allows you to convert and view FLIF files.
• flifcrush - A brute-force FLIF optimizer.