We are in 2024 and I thought a lot of things have entered the law of diminishing returns. We cant make any decent improvement without massive trade offs. The next generation Video Codec beyond VVC / H.266 requires equal amount of complexity increase in encoding and decoding. That is the first time in video codec history and it is quite possible it wont work well without hardware acceleration.
But here we have two new codec HALAC(High Availability Lossless Audio Compression) and HALIC (High Availability Lossless Image Compression).[1][2], where High Availability is only a name and not in any means to High Availability itself. And a word play on its Authors initial ( Hakan Abbas ).
The first thing is that since both are lossless codec, it makes comparison much easer because by definition all lossless codec produces the same results. Unlike Lossy codec of image or audio like JPEG / AVIF and AAC / OPUS.
For images, it produce smaller results than JPEG-XL, current state of art lossless codec, while being 10-20x faster in encode, 2-8x faster in decode depending on how many threads.And 5 - 50x reduction in memory usage. And there were still lots of optimisation not being made.
For Audio it is either Top 3 or Median in compression compared to all current Lossless codec, while anywhere between 5-9x faster in encoding and 3-5x faster in decoding.
And all these results are backed by long time members of HydrogenAudio and Encode.ru. For which I have been forum members for nearly 20 years. So the results are very real.
I rarely use hyped up word but this is absolutely insane. The only downside is that it is not open source. (yet)
[1] https://encode.su/threads/4180-HALAC(High-Availability-Lossless-Audio-Compression)
[2] https://encode.su/threads/4025-HALIC-(High-Availability-Lossless-Image-Compression)