[fitsbits] reopening of Public Comment Period on the compression conventions

[Demitri Muna]

Hi,

I don’t have any opinions on compression algorithms, but I want to note that I’m opposed to the FITS format supporting any lossy compression as part of the format. FITS should be archival, and I think that any lossy representation of data (e.g. a thumbnail) should be created outside of the file. Lossy algorithms can improve dramatically over time with the increase of CPU speed (see the ~50% space improvement from H.264 to H.265 for the same quality). Thumbnails are extremely cheap to create and cache and become cheaper to do so over time with faster I/O and CPU. It’s common in archives to have jpg files next to FITS files for this reason - I don’t see a benefit to building this into the format. Keep things light.

Cheers,
Demitri

_________________________________________
Demitri Muna

Department of Astronomy
Le Ohio State University

Home page: http://muna.com

My Projects:
http://nightlightapp.io
http://trillianverse.org
http://scicoder.org



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