I want to apologize.

I may have been too quick with announcing the file format to be finished. I'm frankly overwhelmed with the attention this is getting. With all the implementations already out there, I thought it was a good idea to finalize the specification ASAP. I'm no longer sure if that was the right decision.

QOI is probably good enough the way it is now, but I'm wondering if there are things that could be done better — without sacrificing the simplicity or performance of this format.

One of these things is the fact that QOI_RUN_16 was determined to be pretty useless, and QOI could be become even simpler by just removing it. Maybe there's more easy wins with a different hash function or distributing some bits differently? I don't know.

At the risk of annoying everyone: how do you all feel about giving QOI a bit more time to mature?

To be clear, the things I'd be willing to discuss here are fairly limited:

• I don't want more features (higher bit depth, custom headers, more meta info...).
• I'm generally against any ideas that make the format more complex (e.g. mode switches, transforms into YUV colorspace...)
• I don't want to make decoding of the chunks to be dependent on some information in the header (e.g. different behaviours for 3 or 4 channels)

What I'm looking for specifically is:

• Changes that make the format simpler
• Changes that would yield better performance when en-/decoding
• Changes that improve compression without making QOI more complex

Should we set a deadline in 2-3 weeks to produce the really-final (pinky promise) specification? Or should we just leave it as it is?

Again, I'm very sorry for the confusing messaging!

Edit: Thanks for your feedback. Let's produce the final spec till 2021.12.20.