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No. 

 

Doesn't this belong in iPad Questions? 

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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  • 1 month later...

Well this is actually more a theme on the latest Apple supported systems (I'm not sure if Apple will support this format on older systems via some updates then too). - Further the Affinity products also do run on Windows and there on that OS HEIC files aren't yet supported.

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10 hours ago, Oval said:

knock knock knock …

(Other developers already integrated HEIC import for older OS.)

Which developers did this & what does "for older OS" mean? As I understand it, Photoshop just added support for the HEIC format less than two months ago, & import is only available on Macs running macOS 10.13 High Sierra, which is the most recent macOS version.

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Further ...

Quote

...HEIF itself is a container, and when containing images and image sequences encoded in a particular format (e.g., HEVC or H.264/AVC), its use becomes subject to the licensing of patents on the coding format. Generally, lawful use of a patented invention requires the patent holder's permission in countries where the patent is in force. ...

Quote

...HEIF and HEVC are extensively covered by patents, which means there could be legal implications to implementing HEIF support, particularly in paid software or a hardware product...

... or ...

Quote

Is there a royalty on HEIF? If so, do we know what it is, or will it be another HEVC nightmare?

HEIF is a subset of HEVC, as it contains a single HEVC “keyframe” or “I frame”. These are the frames in a video codec that are encoded as a whole, and not predicted from other frames. Therefore, only the HEVC patents that cover still image encoding are relevant to HEIF, and not the patents that deal with frame predictions, motion estimation and compensation, temporal modes, etc.

The current patent pools don’t make a distinction between “still image” patents and the rest of the HEVC patents, so it’s not clear how HEIF can be licensed, other than paying the full HEVC royalties. It makes sense that if the format becomes popular, the patent pools would offer a reduced “HEIF-only” license fee.

That said, I can’t think of many companies that will only use HEIF and not HEVC, since today image and video workflows are tied closely together. Camera vendors such as Canon, Nikon and Sony all make cameras that shoot both still images and videos, software vendors such as Adobe create image and video software, and most online photo service such as Flickr, Snapfish, Shutterfly etc. support both photo and video sharing. In all of these examples, vendors who license HEVC for their video flow will get the HEIF license “for free”.

... so there are probably royalty fees which I assume Apple probably pays for using it in their actual systems. The Q in turn is how third party vendors have to deal with this here.

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And still further...

 

Pixelmator for Mac was updated in October to support importing HEIF files, but again this is only supported on macOS 10.13 High Sierra.  It also supports the "Edit with" feature of Apple Photos but since so far no third party app can save files in the HEIF format, any editing work done in any third party app via "Edit with" will pass a JPEG version back to Photos. The same is true for export or save -- as things stand now no third party app can write HEIF format files at all.

 

So basically, unless you are running High Sierra there is nothing you can do with the HEIF format, & even if you are the only apps that can save files in that format are a few Apple ones like Preview or Photos.

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3 hours ago, R C-R said:

unless you are running High Sierra there is nothing you can do with the HEIF format

 

This is the reason why it would be a good idea to support HEIC import, because Affinity works on 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, 10.10, 10.11, 10.12. If users get HEIC files, they would like to use them. Or would it be a good idea to cancel the support for 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, 10.10, 10.11, 10.12?!

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55 minutes ago, Oval said:

This is the reason why it would be a good idea to support HEIC import, because Affinity works on 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, 10.10, 10.11, 10.12. If users get HEIC files, they would like to use them.

I do not understand what you mean by this. HEIC support, such as it is, is provided by macOS 10.13, not by anything provided by application software, not even by Apple's apps. So if you use a Mac & are running any earlier version than 10.13, you can't open or import HEIC formatted files.

 

Are you suggesting Affinity should develop or license some sort of in-app support that does not rely on 10.13 & can be used independently of that?

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There are a bunch of Github src projects (libs, apps and converters etc.) which all already deal with it:

So it might be overall more a codec and format license theme here.

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1 hour ago, Oval said:
3 hours ago, R C-R said:

I do not understand

 

Import of HEIC files on systems that are not 10.13, 10.14, 10.15

 

Yes, I understand that is what you want, but the question is how do you expect the Affinity apps to be coded do this? No Mac app does this on its own. They all rely on the HEIC support built into 10.13 to read HEIC coded files. And no third party Mac app can write HEIC files because Apple has as yet not made that support available in 10.13. IOW, no 10.13, no support for HEIC files at all.

 

So do you expect Serif/Affinity to somehow write the equivalent of this 10.13 OS system level support into the Affinity apps, & deal with the entangled licensing issues @v_kyr mentioned, or something else? If something else, what?

 

Regarding the github projects, I could be way off on this but from what I can tell they rely in part on code licensed by Nokia, which is limited to the "non-commercial purposes of evaluation, testing and academic research," prohibits sub-licensing, & when used may infringe on patents not owned by Nokia.

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The Apple WWDC 2017 - Session 511 gives some good info about how HEVC/HEIF are incorporated into the actual Apple low level to high level frameworks (ImageIO/CoreGraphics/CoreImage/UIKit) and how to use them for reading/writing etc.  See...

NOTE: that writing HEIC files also highly depends on the platform and if it has HEVC hardware encoder support or not.

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Well one has not to rely on Apple for this, here is an example by using ffmpeg to generate a bitstream file and then using writerapp to create a proper metadata HEIF file. The generated HEIF image file can afterwards be previewed.

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13 minutes ago, Oval said:
3 hours ago, R C-R said:

No Mac app does this on its own.      no third party Mac app can write HEIC files

I see, you know all apps.         i m p o r t

What I know is that Mac apps do not write files because they do not have direct access to the file system. That would present a huge security vulnerability, so instead they are required to ask the OS to do that on their behalf. So, since there is no support for writing HEIC files in Mac OS versions lower than macOS 10.13, there is no way the Affinity or any other apps can get the HEIC file written unless the OS is macOS 10.13 or higher.

 

I am not sure what your "I m p o r t" sentence fragment is supposed to imply but the same consideration applies for importing/reading HEIC formatted files -- there is no support for that built into in lower OS versions than macOS 10.13, which (again) is why Photoshop & Pixelator only support importing these files on macOS 10.13 or later.

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6 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Well one has not to rely on Apple for this, here is an example by using ffmpeg to generate a bitstream file and then using writerapp to create a proper metadata HEIF file.

From that link:

Quote

 

Why (maybe) not use HEIF?

  • HEIF and HEVC are extensively covered by patents, which means there could be legal implications to implementing HEIF support, particularly in paid software or a hardware product.

 

 

Hopefully, nobody is asking Serif to ignore these legal implications ... right? :o

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Serif makes and sells commercial software so they have of course to take care of this! But I'm sure they (Serif) will handle this for their MacOS software versions, as far as Apple finally provides their OS support and related dev frameworks here. - Since Apple hopefully has already licensed it in a way, that their third party developers can (re)use these formats.

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1 minute ago, v_kyr said:

Serif makes and sells commercial software so they have of course to take care of this! But I'm sure they (Serif) will handle this for their MacOS software versions, as far as Apple finally provides their OS support and related dev frameworks here. - Since Apple hopefully has already licensed it in a way, that their third party developers can reuse these formats.

Sure, but the OS level support is only provided in macOS 10.13 (& presumably later versions) so I still do not understand what @Oval expects Serif/Affinity to do to make it possible for the Affinity apps to import HEIC files on systems that are not running 10.13 or later. Do you?

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1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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I think he means that it would be generally nice, if Serif could offer OS version independent read/write (or import/export) HEIC file support here. So that you could also make use of it on other older OS versions too. - Technically it would be possible, then there are other third party royalty free usable libraries available which would handle these formats.

BTW, MS offers too a free to use HEVC Video Extension which in turn is the foundation for the HEIF format.

 

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