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WebP - A new image format for the Web (by Google)

developers.google.com

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Re: WebP - A new image format for the Web (by Google)

#11

Post by mirsadm »

mistercow wrote: post #10
mirsadm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebP support transparency with lossy compression which is a huge advantage over JPEG. When I was studying image compression back at university we wrote a whole bunch of lossy/lossless codecs. The issue is that most of the cool algorithms are protected by patents (such as Arithmetic coding). JPEG is quite old now and you can achieve much better results with wavelet coding as opposed to the traditional DCT approach. Pl…

> such as Arithmetic coding Isn't range coding widely viewed as being a legitimate workaround for the arithmetic coding patents? I guess in a year or two the question will be irrelevant, as the last of those patents will expire soon.

I think it is all still a little sketchy. There's a lot of uncertainty regarding the patents so most people seem to just stay away from it.

Re: WebP - A new image format for the Web (by Google)

#13

Post by ChrisNorstrom »

Even if it's significantly better, do the means justify the ends? On massive sites with millions of images, like flickr or facebook, converting all their jpegs into webps to save on bandwidth and speed would mean that they would have to duplicate every single jpeg image (keep the jpegs for older browsers) with a webp copy to serve to newer browsers that support webp. But by doing that you're nearly doubling the HD space of the entire service. More HDs, more servers, more electricity, more personnel. So whatever money was saved on bandwidth (which is getting cheaper all the time) is negated by the architecture required to pull off the transition.

I feel like this is one of those: "good inventions that are better than the competition but have no demand from the market."

Re: WebP - A new image format for the Web (by Google)

#14

Post by ronaldj »

We could make the web a lot faster and/or do some really cool stuff if we had a lossy image format with an alpha channel. It'd be nice this got picked up by all browser vendors. Sadly, I fear that they'll be squabbling over it, just like they are with VP8/Ogg/h.264.

I really believe that the companies involved in web standards are holding progress back at this point. At the same time, even if they all agreed to put this in tomorrow, we'd still be stuck supporting IE6-9 which will never have it. Being a web developer sucks sometimes.

Re: WebP - A new image format for the Web (by Google)

#15

Post by danmaz74 »

mirsadm wrote: post #9
rollypolly wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just browsers, but all image editors (natively) like Photoshop. But at its core, WebP hasn't been shown to be more than marginally better than JPEG, so why bother modifying your tool chain and work flow? You generally need something to be an order of magnitude better for people to bother.

WebP support transparency with lossy compression which is a huge advantage over JPEG. When I was studying image compression back at university we wrote a whole bunch of lossy/lossless codecs. The issue is that most of the cool algorithms are protected by patents (such as Arithmetic coding). JPEG is quite old now and you can achieve much better results with wavelet coding as opposed to the traditional DCT approach. Pl…

"jpeg" with transparency would really be a boon...

Re: WebP - A new image format for the Web (by Google)

#16

Post by mistercow »

mirsadm wrote: post #11
mistercow wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> such as Arithmetic coding Isn't range coding widely viewed as being a legitimate workaround for the arithmetic coding patents? I guess in a year or two the question will be irrelevant, as the last of those patents will expire soon.

I think it is all still a little sketchy. There's a lot of uncertainty regarding the patents so most people seem to just stay away from it.

Gotta love that result from a system that's supposed to foster innovation...

Re: WebP - A new image format for the Web (by Google)

#17

Post by ronaldj »

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #13

Even if it's significantly better, do the means justify the ends? On massive sites with millions of images, like flickr or facebook, converting all their jpegs into webps to save on bandwidth and speed would mean that they would have to duplicate every single jpeg image (keep the jpegs for older browsers) with a webp copy to serve to newer browsers that support webp. But by doing that you're nearly doubling the HD sp…

I think that for some interactive content, we could do definitely utilize WeP's lossy alpha channel format. The one thing that pops up in my mind are filmstrip animations, where you make a animation using JS and a single image that has all your frames. This allows you to control its playback with JS and gives you better image quality than GIF. Right now we can use JPEG compression for this, but this means we have to bake the page background into the frames or use a huge PNG.

With enough browser support an animation like this could just fallback to a single PNG for older browsers and newer browsers would be better experiences.

Re: WebP - A new image format for the Web (by Google)

#18

Post by ronaldj »

cabirum wrote: post #12

No one needs smaller images anymore. With today's bandwidths getting higher, image sizes are irrelevant. One-time 25% decrease in image size, years in development and more years to widespread adoption, not worth it.

Yes yes yes we do! Bandwidth may be increasing, but as displays get better we are going to be serving up ever increasing assets. Sites are already serving up 2x'd versions of images for iOS devices that have higher resolution screens. These higher res images essentially quadruple your file size. On top of that these devices are mobile, which lag behind broadband/ethernet connections AND many of which have data limit caps.

Re: WebP - A new image format for the Web (by Google)

#19

Post by albertzeyer »

ronaldj wrote: post #14

We could make the web a lot faster and/or do some really cool stuff if we had a lossy image format with an alpha channel. It'd be nice this got picked up by all browser vendors. Sadly, I fear that they'll be squabbling over it, just like they are with VP8/Ogg/h.264. I really believe that the companies involved in web standards are holding progress back at this point. At the same time, even if they all agreed to put t…

I haven't really tried it yet but I wonder if you might get ugly artifacts if the alpha channel is lossy. Maybe it has to be exact.
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