Is SheerVideo useful for the PNG codec?
Probably. If you’re using PNG for real-world RGB 8b content, then SheerVideo is the perfect substitute. Not only does SheerVideo encode 60 times faster (110 versus 1.8 MiB/s on a 1-processor 1 GHz Mac G4) and decode 5 times faster (100 versus 18 MiB/s) than Apple’s excellent implementation of PNG, and SheerVideo decodes 15 times faster (100 versus 6.3 MiB/s). SheerVideo is also 20% more powerful (2.20 versus 1.80) for real-world footage. And unlike PNG, SheerVideo also supports native video formats as well as RGB[A]. although PNG also supports 16-bit channels. On the other hand, for poster-quality imagery, PNG generally has much higher compression power, for which PNG also supports low-precision color modes. So if you need PNG to compress poster-quality content, then SheerVideo can serve as a faster and slimmer input format for PNG, which is particularly useful if you’re experimenting with different parameter settings in PNG to get the highest compression.
