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>I saw a grayscale BMP file getting better compression with FLAC (!) than JXL.

I thought FLAC are for audio only or am I missing something?

Compared to other Lossless I thought JXL was quite computational heavy, even with the very recent optimisation. HALIC (High Availability Lossless Image Compression) is still unbelievably good. Except it is not open source ( yet ).

Hopefully we will see work on image quality improvement at below BPP 1.0 this year.



FLAC is meant for audio only. But you can open a BMP file as raw audio (8-bit unsigned mono) using a sound-editing tool, then save it as a FLAC file. Since FLAC is lossless, you get your original data back when you decompress it.

It just happened to work particularly well on a certain grayscale image. Because only an 8-bit grayscale image could potentially be similar to 8-bit mono unsigned audio, I wouldn't try any other image format.




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