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Is WebP really better than JPEG?

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21–30 of 319 posts

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#21
post #14

I just relaunched a website that makes extensive use of photographic collages that necessitate alpha backgrounds. They were previously shipping "retina-grade", multi-megabyte images all over, a typical page load could easily reach 25mb. I managed to refit it with ` ` tags using WEBP as well as JP2. The latter was a great deal of trouble, it appears that "the community" (notably Gatsby and Contentful) are very happy t…

Safari Mobile is a broken mess not worth supporting.

From a business point of view, it makes sense to waste a few days once in a while to support it.

But sometimes you can't support it without huge hacks like implementing everything on CPU with WebAssemply. For example MediaSource is disabled on Safari for iPhones (but enabled since a few months for iPads). I think the only reason is to force developers to publish apps in the AppStore. Which is a pain.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#23

Does anyone have insight as to whether this same evaluation re:AVIF applies to WebM? Edit: saw somewhere that it is used in production for real-time video, but had trouble using rav1e as opposed to libvpx

Yes: Google heavily promoted their format but unless you’re serving a high volume of traffic it’s not worth the cost of doubling your storage and maintaining a separate toolchain to lower your transfer by perhaps 10%. By now more devices have hardware support so its performance is more competitive but at this point I’d go straight to AV1.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#24
Is there something wrong with the AVIF decoder's chroma upscaling? E.g. look at "Kodim 3", where the colored hats overlap each other. There's severe blocking, where I'd expect blurring instead. All the other formats blur, which is much less distracting.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#25
This is a weird comparison, while I get the comparison of non-transparent images jpeg or webp are probably fine.

However the main benefit of webp is alpha backgrounds or transparency. It can destroy PNG when it comes to compression and size.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#26
post #14

I just relaunched a website that makes extensive use of photographic collages that necessitate alpha backgrounds. They were previously shipping "retina-grade", multi-megabyte images all over, a typical page load could easily reach 25mb. I managed to refit it with ` ` tags using WEBP as well as JP2. The latter was a great deal of trouble, it appears that "the community" (notably Gatsby and Contentful) are very happy t…

Safari Mobile is a broken mess not worth supporting.

Since Safari (and WebKit) are the only available Web-rendering engine for iOS and iPadOS (and the default one for MacOS), it's kind of important to be able to at least render usefully on it.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#27

As someone who hosts images on their site, what is the best software (preferably open source) one can use to compress JPEG images imported from a digital camera? I would be glad to serve only JPEGs and dispense with WebP versions and simplify my site html. A straightforward encoding of a JPEG into a WebP (using GIMP) does give me an almost 1/3rd reduction in file size, which is not insignificant.

When you convert JPEG to WebP, you're converting data in a lossy format to another lossy format. Of course you're going to get good JPEG to WebP compression, because you're starting with a low-quality source. If you start with a lossless image (RAW/PNG/TIFF/etc.) instead of a JPEG, you might get different results.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#28

I just relaunched a website that makes extensive use of photographic collages that necessitate alpha backgrounds. They were previously shipping "retina-grade", multi-megabyte images all over, a typical page load could easily reach 25mb. I managed to refit it with ` ` tags using WEBP as well as JP2. The latter was a great deal of trouble, it appears that "the community" (notably Gatsby and Contentful) are very happy t…

WEBP support has been added to the next version of Safari (14).

!!!!

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#29
post #16

chrome keeps changing downloaded images to webP which is annoyin af. can't even find a way to disable it

Are you sure that’s Chrome and not a website which selects the format based on the client’s advertised capabilities? I know Facebook did that and it confused a lot of people when a .jpg wasn’t a JPEG.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#30
I really want a better alpha-mask standard to emerge. PNG24 is attractive, but huge. PNG8/GIF works well, but is pretty limited.

I don't think WebP is it, but we'll see what comes out of the scrum. I'll work with whatever that is, but I won't waste my time chasing will o' the wisp "standards."

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