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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)

#331

Post by ubercow13 »

BackBlast wrote: post #256
ubercow13 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's room for different opinions. His font choice is terrible for my legibility. Maybe for others it's great. But it made the already difficult article that much harder to read. And I like this topic. I already seriously question his sense of what is reasonable and good and for what purpose. His purposes are so alien to mine that his opinion ends up being pretty irrelevant to mine. I wish him well with his. I can'…

If you tried and couldn't see, it might be like others say that it's more visible on certain monitors and setups. But then, again - if you are designing codecs or choosing them, you probably want a monitor that makes it easy to see these things. I can see them on my old iPhone screen.

It reminds me of how sometimes you see a huge billboard hideously strong 10 foot wide JPEG compression artifacts. It was someone's job to make those, too.

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

#333

Post by vardump »

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.

This seems to be highly subjective. I had absolutely no problem seeing those artifacts without any pixel peeping, they're that obvious.

WebP image gradients just looked broken (posterized) except the lossless one, which was (obviously) perfect.

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

#334

Post by stjohnswarts »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #234
hot_gril wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but I just don't fw webp and other weird formats. JPEG and PNG are tried and true, also it's nice how the extension indicates lossiness. On the technical side, webp support still isn't like png. Tried dragging a webp into Google Slides just now, got "unsupported image type," which is ironic. I'll try again in like 10 years.

> On the technical side, webp support still isn't like png. Oh that's a good point. I see lossless WEBP mostly as a way to save bandwith where PNG would have been used . If you've got a pipeline where, anyway, you already "crush" your PNG file, you may as well also generate a lossless WEBP file and serve that: all browsers support it. And you can fall back on the optimized PNG should the browser not support WEBP. I m…

At this point in my life, I just don't have time. I basically use either mp4 or PNG for all web "images/animation" when doing web pages. I don't detect browsers or the like. Unless there is some revolutionary new image/video tech, I'll stick with them for the foreseeable future. I only bother with JPEG when it's straight from the phone/camera and I don't want any reduction in quality from the original high rez.

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

#335

Post by stjohnswarts »

scrlk wrote: post #146
pembrook wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's a weird thing to say unless the pixel density is your one and only measure. Is it though? We now have OLED TVs and OLED smartphones. Where's our OLED PC monitors? On every measure, if you care about colors/contrast/black+white levels/resolution/density, the average computer monitor has fallen far behind. You can't even buy a smartphone that has a panel half as bad as most PC monitors on the market. And, at l…

> Where's our OLED PC monitors? https://www.displayninja.com/oled-monitor-list/ Mainly targeted towards the gaming market at the moment.

some of those prices are insane. Why are they so much more expensive that OLED TV's of similar size? Frame rate?

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

#337

Post by ksec »

izacus wrote: post #219
acdha wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In what way does "anything cut" against anything when you do cherry picked single datum point comparison? There isn't a codec pair in this world where you can't make a cherry picked comparison where one of them is worse (I've done plenty of those).

Except the problem isn't in a single image, it is a pattern that is frequently there and the image was only used to demonstrate it. WebP has this problem way back as one of the reason others were hesitant to support it except Google.

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

#338

Post by kec »

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…

Laptop and desktop monitors have been advancing just fine over in the Apple world with high ppi, brightness and color accuracy being standard for nearly a decade... it's just expensive and so one of the first corners cut for PC as most folks simply don't care.

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

#339

Post by ksec »

acdha wrote: post #166
izacus wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is basically the same with all On2 Media marketing. From WebP, VP8, VP9 to AV1. And it has been going on for over a decade.

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

#340

Post by BackBlast »

ubercow13 wrote: post #331
BackBlast wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's room for different opinions. His font choice is terrible for my legibility. Maybe for others it's great. But it made the already difficult article that much harder to read. And I like this topic. I already seriously question his sense of what is reasonable and good and for what purpose. His purposes are so alien to mine that his opinion ends up being pretty irrelevant to mine. I wish him well with his. I can'…

If you tried and couldn't see, it might be like others say that it's more visible on certain monitors and setups. But then, again - if you are designing codecs or choosing them, you probably want a monitor that makes it easy to see these things. I can see them on my old iPhone screen. It reminds me of how sometimes you see a huge billboard hideously strong 10 foot wide JPEG compression artifacts. It was someone's job…

> But then, again - if you are designing codecs or choosing them, you probably want a monitor that makes it easy to see these things

You keep bringing this up. I don't really care. Someone designing a codec may have put this apparent problem case on the don't-care list as well. I would be in general agreement with the designer's priorities for a reasonable web codec.

I have, with some care, selected webp as a general codec for web use on most of my sites. Nobody is complaining, and my page weights and development speed is improved. I don't have to fret between png+transparency and jpg to minimize asset size while maintaining it's usability. I just use webp and most of the time it's a size/speed win with good enough quality.

Not every codec needs to be artist and photographer approved.

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