RIOT plugin for Irfan View

[luciansabo]

version 0.2.1 released and tagged *stable*

Version 0.2.1 was released. This fixes the remaining bugs from 0.2 and adds some speed optimizations.
0.2.1 is now the last stable version of RIOT.
I will continue to provide the old 0.1 ANSI version for Windows 9x users.

Starting from now the RIOT application has a MSI installer. The rar package is available also for those than preffer not to install anything or want to put the program on a portable media.
I think it would be nice to have an installer for the plugin version also. I will make that when I will have more time.

Changelog:

v.0.2.1 (26 nov 2008) (stable)
- added all corrections from 0.1.13 until 0.1.15 to fix bugs that affected 0.2
- JPEG processing speed improvement by 25%.
This is done using SIMD optimized instructions (MMX, SSE,SSE2, 3DNow!).
- overall speed optimizations

PS: You need to overwrite the old FreeImage.dll to get the increased speed.

[boarder's paradise]

Wonderful that you also provide a "no-install" version of you program, Lucian. Please continue doing so.

[Sam_Zen]

Personally I don't care about an installer, but as long as there's a choice, it's fine by me.
Wouldn't it be handy if you put the link to download at the bottom of such an announcement ?
Now, people have to look for the latest URL somewhere in the forum.

[boarder's paradise]

Personally I don't care about an installer, but as long as there's a choice, it's fine by me.

I'm so glad to have the sanctus of someone who has no decision-making-power over RIOT whatsoever

Wouldn't it be handy if you put the link to download at the bottom of such an announcement ?

or even better: a download link in the thread's first post, which gets updated by Lucian, so that there's only a single location.

[Sam_Zen]

Yep, whatever. If better is the question. Going back to the first post means extra navigation.

[luciansabo]

I've put the website in my signature, so it's easy now to go there.

[stefan0n]

hello, just downloaded 0.2.1 from your site and installed in plugin directory. now when I do 'save for web (plugin)' from the IrfanView I get an error message: 'can't load plugin RIOT.DLL', please download or update etc...

[luciansabo]

Follow the provided instructions to install the plugin. If you use the extended version FreeImage.dll should be copied in the main IrfanView folder not in the plugin folder (where the irfanview executable is).

[stefan0n]

FreeImage.dll should be copied in the main IrfanView folder not in the plugin folder

this was my fault, sorry. thank you!

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Speed of Lanczos Filter Resize

I've been running some tests with IrfanView and cannot figure out why it s so fast.

Load any very large image in IrfanView and resize it to 25% with the slowest Lanczos resize filter (no sharpen after resize), and see how it compares to other applications.

For my Whirlpool Galaxy test image 5739 x 3983 Pixels

IrfanView takes 1 second
The RIOT Plugin takes 10 seconds
PhotoPlus 11 takes 38 seconds
PagePlusX2 or X3 takes about 45 seconds

So how do other applications compare, and is IrfanView cheating by doing a bilinear resize or something else?

The image I am using is from Space Telescope Dot Org

I saved it as a PNG to save space.

[luciansabo]

As far as RIOT is involved, the time needed to resample is actually smaller than the total processing time. After resample RIOT is processing the optimized image - saving the image in memory, loading from memory, displaying. The status is shown in the status bar.

So for that image resampling with Lanczos takes only ~3s from 10.
Count seconds as long as "Resampling" is displayed in the status bar.

Why Irfan view so quick at downsampling ? Hard to say... if it is not using any SIMD (cpu specific) optimizations I don't think it's possible to go that fast, but I may be wrong.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

IrfanView is also processing the image to display it @ Fit to Window, so we should compare its 1 second performance to ~10 seconds, not to ~3 seconds. In the case of other programs it is ~25 or ~45 seconds.

Is there any test image that would clearly show that the Lanczos3 resampling method had been used instead of bilinear or other simpler methods?

[luciansabo]

IrfanView is also processing the image to display it @ Fit to Window

This is not time consuming. It takes fractions of a second.

so we should compare its 1 second performance to ~10 seconds, not to ~3 seconds.

If you don't believe what I said you are free to compare to any number of seconds you want. But on what basis ?
RIOT is not a viewer, you compare different things. If you want to test how fast RIOT is resampling count seconds as long as 'Resampling' message is shown in the status bar. The time needed to execute additional tasks, compress, save to memory then load again from memory and draw onto the screen twice is considerably bigger than resample.

You cannot test if Lanczos was used. You just look at the results. Bilinear and bicubic give smooth, slighly blurred results. If the result is a sharp picture with some amplitude locality preservations errors, then it's a multi-lobed sinc type (lanczos family) filter.

[luciansabo]

0.3 beta officially released

I am proud to announce the long awaited 0.3 beta of RIOT.

http://luci.criosweb.ro/riot/2009/02/03-beta-officially-released/

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

The download links are illegal URLs because they have commas in them:

Change:

http://luci,criosweb.ro/riot/beta/Riot_dll.rar

To:

http://luci.criosweb.ro/riot/beta/Riot_dll.rar

etc. All looking good so far. A couple of typos in the About dialogue:

© 2008 should be © 2009, and "a lot of passion" should be "a lot of passion into"