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WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

eng.aurelienpierre.com

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Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#161

Post by mort96 »

laserbeam wrote: post #6

I know this is not constructive and I'm sorry, but I just can't read the text with those st and ct ligatures. It makes me feel like the author is trolling with them and I shouldn't take the text seriously. I know that's an exaggeration but that's what the design makes me feel.

I read this comment. I thought, "wow typical HN, someone has taken the time to write this big blog post and the top comment is about some stupid little typographic detail."

Then I went to read the text and... :(

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#162

Post by RedShift1 »

chrismorgan wrote: post #47
ColonelPhantom wrote: post #3

It's such a shame Google decided to block adoption of JPEG XL: it's a strict improvement over classic JPEG (you can losslessly reencode JPEG to JXL and reduce the size, due to a better entropy coder in JXL!) and JXL has various other upgrades compared to 'classic' JPEG. In the meantime, let's hope AVIF or whatever manages to pick up the slack, and/or other browsers decide en masse to support JPEG XL anyway; that woul…

Google haven’t explicitly decided to block adoption of JPEG XL. They removed an incomplete implementation from Chromium which had never been shipped, because it was a maintenance burden and they weren’t ready to commit to supporting it. That’s quite a different thing. It may indicate a broader strategic direction, but it doesn’t necessarily.

The called it technically inferior based on opinions. They didn't do a thorough technical review, and why would they, they have webp. This was absolutely a strategical thing, it's naive to think it isn't.

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#163

Post by afavour »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #82
627467 wrote: post #66

> To the non-educated eye, this might look ok, but for a photographer it’s not, and for several reasons. There surely must be better examples to show "non-educated" plebs (to use the tone of the post) why webp is bad and to justify the post and the tone. I'm on Android, maybe this is why all pic quality look the same? Also - yeah, if you are making pics for educated eyes: don't use tech that is not suitable for educa…

See the discussion here [1], you need to view it full size to be able to tell. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38653224

…so essentially WebP is fine for mobile devices and the vast majority of desktop web cases. I’m fine with WebP not being a suitable format for permanent storage of photography.

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#164

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

layer8 wrote: post #157

The simple truth is that JPEG is more than good enough and has ubiquitous support. There is no reason to switch to a different format and risk degradation or reduced interoperability for slightly smaller file sizes.

I don't understand fanatically chasing smaller image sizes when JPEG was good enough for the web of the 90's. There must be a different reason to throw some of the highest paid engineers in the world at WebP and it ain't generosity.

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#166

Post by acdha »

izacus wrote: post #151
627467 wrote: post #66

> To the non-educated eye, this might look ok, but for a photographer it’s not, and for several reasons. There surely must be better examples to show "non-educated" plebs (to use the tone of the post) why webp is bad and to justify the post and the tone. I'm on Android, maybe this is why all pic quality look the same? Also - yeah, if you are making pics for educated eyes: don't use tech that is not suitable for educa…

For starters, anyone that ever worked with a codec, will know that you don't compare them with ONE SINNGLE IMAGE. This whole basic idea of the blog post is just to generate more whining and clicks and not to actually make a comparison between formats that's worth a basic smell test.

This cuts against WebP more: all of Google’s marketing was “it’s a third smaller!!!!” and then when you looked they were comparing it to unoptimized libjpeg outout and using computational metrics like SSIM which only crudely approximate what humans notice about image quality.

I did the same comparison the author did when WebP came out but used an optimized JPEG encoder and found the same conclusion: when you produced subjectively equivalent images, the savings were more like -10% to +15% and for web sites which didn’t get Google-scale traffic the performance impact was negative since it made caching less effective and you had to support an entire new toolchain.

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#167

Post by Pxtl »

ubercow13 wrote: post #122
627467 wrote: post #66

> To the non-educated eye, this might look ok, but for a photographer it’s not, and for several reasons. There surely must be better examples to show "non-educated" plebs (to use the tone of the post) why webp is bad and to justify the post and the tone. I'm on Android, maybe this is why all pic quality look the same? Also - yeah, if you are making pics for educated eyes: don't use tech that is not suitable for educa…

The authors point is that if you are making this tech, you should have educated eyes. And given all the confident comments in this thread claiming the author is full of shit and there's no difference, I think their frustration is justified? If you can't see the difference in the first images that's fine but you probably shouldn't be confidently claiming to know better than the author, let alone designing an image cod…

Still, the author could do more to highlight the differences using zooms and annotations. The banding in the background is particularly strong and would help their point to highlight visually to the reader.

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#168

Post by acdha »

RealStickman_ wrote: post #70
mihaic wrote: post #30

This article didn't go into the biggest problem with webp for me: the inconveninence of the format outside the browser compared to the small space saving. There are better formats (the video-codec inspired ones like heif, avif, and what might come out of h266, or even jpeg-xl), and webp just seems like a compromise without enough upside.

WebP is actually based on a video codec. It's just that VP8 pretty much never caught on with hardware encoders/decoders apparently.

VP8 was never competitive so most of the energy went into VP9, which did beat H264.

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#169

Post by arghwhat »

snvzz wrote: post #17

webp should have been skipped entirely. Let's focus on AVIF.

Honestly, for these cases focus on JXL. It supports lossless re-packaging of existing JPEG with compression benefits, more or less matches AVIF while having much options for much better compression times.

But if JXL isn't an option, definitely AVIF.

Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)

#170

Post by Pxtl »

iSnow wrote: post #145
pembrook wrote: post #124

I've noticed the same issue with WebP and have gone back to JPG/PNG for most things (jpg for photos, png for UI-type images) I think the real problem is, like many of the commenters here, most people can't tell the difference because desktop monitors have been stuck in a deadzone of zero innovation for the last 10 years. I'm sure half the folks here are viewing his example images on a 2012-era HD 1920x1080 LCD, which…

I have an extremely hard time perceiving any difference on a 27" 4K monitor. I am not even sure I really see them. The examples are just bad. If you want to show something, screenshot and enlarge it to show the artifacts.

> The examples are just bad. If you want to show something, screenshot and enlarge it to show the artifacts.

Yes! Where's the red underlines and diffs? I can see the background banding, but the foreground looks the same at a glance except that some of them look ambiguously "off" in ways that could just be placebo.

You'd think a visual artist would be more interested in visual communication and not just a wall of text with un-annotated photos.

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