Optimise HEIC

[MattiSG]

Hi and thank you so much for maintaining ImageOptim!

I read in #332 (comment) that HEIC is considered as problematic due to HEVC licensing.

I also see that some other tools claim to compress HEIC further (based on my limiting testing, they fail).

I open this issue to have a consolidated place to discuss adding HEIC support to the list of formats handled by ImageOptim, and to potentially clarify the precise licensing issues and potential workarounds, such as a plugin system like ffmpeg does with libx265 🙂

[kornelski]

Nothing has changed in terms of licensing.

Please be aware that licensing of patents is separate from licensing of copyright.

Patents apply to everything. Patent owners own any expression of that patent, made by anyone, anywhere.

If you close yourself in a room, invent an image format completely yourself, write all the code yourself based on your own idea, but it happens to be similar to HEIC, your work will be owned by HEIC owners and you will have to pay them for daring to have thought about the same thing.

So I can't use libx265, because it gives me a copyright license, but they don't own the patents and can't give them to me. Patent owners can go after anybody using libx265 who haven't bought a patent license for the free software written by someone else.

Software patents are horrible. They're terribly unfair. They are a cancer on the industry.

I do not plan to ever support HEIC and urge everyone to treat this format as toxic.

[ylluminate]

Sadly this is being forced upon us more and more and many of us cannot get away from it. It appears it is not going to go away in neither short nor long term... I think we will have to have options that consider it even though patents are a major curse of our present society.

Might it be possible to use this LGPL'd project to fill in this need?: https://github.com/libvips/libvips