Hard to take this seriously with that obnoxious font that draws curlicues connecting letters like s and t.
WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
321–330 of 411 posts
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#322So here’s what I don’t get about this post: > this is WebP re-encoding of an already lossy compressed JPEG Author is clearly passionate about imagery and quality, so why are they not re-encoding using the original file rather than a lossy copy?
> So, I wondered how bad it was for actual raw photos encoded straight in darktable. Meaning just one step of encoding.
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#323This 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.
Even worse that the original blog post, because of this you may be dealing with a JPEG image, converted to WEBP, and then back to JPEG. And then maybe someone edited that JPEG and it got converted back to WEBP!
A large chunk of the hn commentors are debating over banding they can or can't see in a best case scenario WEBP image. The reality is the bulk of the WEBP images look horrible, something I've started to really notice only recently. Of course, you can "clean" the images by using different generative upscaling processes now, which is pretty ironic how much electricity we are using because someone wanted to save 45kb.
Also this reminds me a lot about GIFs being converted to JPEGs. 25~ years ago there was a lot of nice, clean GIF screenshots (256 colors was all you needed) that got destroyed by JPEG.
Google tells developers to use WEBP but has no problem serving petabytes of video ads no one wants to watch!
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#324> 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
No, I can see it on Android without zooming in. Not well for sure, but it is there towards the corners.
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why should it be worse than JPEG in that respect? It's a much newer format and supposedly much better.
It's just a happy accident that the way JPEG compresses things and smooths them out visually happens to be an advantage in this particular edge case.
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Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#326I can see some banding on the one labeled webp lossless. What gives? Is the banding in the source material? Are we using a different definition of "lossless" than i am used to? Edit: i think maybe my browser is scaling the photo which is adding artifacts. Edit2: maybe the thumbnails are scaled at different quality levels???
> maybe the thumbnails are scaled at different quality levels???
Agreed, the WebP lossless version looks pretty bad when scaled by the browser. And since virtually no website/device shows images at their native resolution these days, that's something to consider.
On the other hand, most people these days view websites on their phones, so those artifacts will be harder to see.
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#327Can I just say how happy I am to see the "ct" and "st" ligatures in the article text? I know that took the author extra effort to provide.
I hate it, my brain wants to interpret it as a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_breve
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, in both cases, use something that is better than JPEG and Webp: JPEG XL.
JPEG XL is great except is has virtually no browser support[1] [1]: https://caniuse.com/jpegxl
JPEG XL is clearly superior in almost all contexts, but Google killed it and then Apple is trying to support it now. Unless Google reverses its stance though it will stay dead.
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
My base iPhone 12 mini from years ago has OLED, so do a lot of cheaper Android phones. Gaming displays are far less common than these.
Phones have a smaller display which makes them easier to manufacter.
Yeah, that also supports how the iPads don't have OLED yet.
Re: WebP is so great except it's not (2021)
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
It beat H.264 in terms of quality/size but not in terms of hardware support. This is why Google Meet is the laggiest video conference software, they keep trying to make VP9 a thing while the others stuck with H.264. And now there's H.265.
Google marketed it that way but I could never reproduce a meaningful size savings without noticeable quality loss. You need to serve a LOT of video before even the top-end 10% savings was worth it, especially if your traffic was spread across many items so doubling your storage cost cancelled out a fair chunk of the total. I have no doubt that YouTube saw a savings but I don’t know how many other sites did, and I wou…
If users don't have hardware accelerated video decoding, it's so bad that it actually hurts the experience. I can't imagine that being worth the space savings. There doesn't have to be a good reason YouTube does it, it might just be someone wanting to insert their tech, which I'm pretty sure is the reason Meet uses it.