Is WebP really better than JPEG? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#141

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

thdrdt wrote: post #136

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #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."

Some time ago I experimented with a reduced color palette and dithering while keeping the fill alpha info. It reduced the file size a lot while keeping the alpha.

Yeah, there's a number of ways to reduce GIF/PNG8 sizes.

I started writing Web sites in the mid-'90s, where a page was supposed to be about 30K (quaint, huh?).

The prevailing wisdom, then, was no dither, adaptive palette, and reduce the color palette until it hurts, then back up one.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#142

Post by kn8 » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 5:29 PM UTC

In my experience, when building websites, webp has always been smaller thus far.

For anyone interested and building sites with Next.js, I've released a plugin for optimizing images and converting to webp with fallback to jpg/png: https://github.com/humaans/next-img/

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#143

Post by DavidSJ » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 5:33 PM UTC

gsich wrote: post #122

gruturo wrote: post #86

Every time I run an image comparison, the webp version looks worse and yet Google insists it's the same quality. It's baffling. Even if the above were just an individual... bafflement? and not an actual issue, the size savings really don't seem worth the compatibility hassle, the extra manpower/workflow complexity to support 2 formats, the additional storage (and caching) caused by this duplication. And the above is…

I also don't get it why people insist on the same quality with lesser size. How about more quality and the same filesize?

If you can get one then you can get the other, for any compression format that allows varying compression ratios.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#144

Post by moring » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 5:35 PM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #127

moring wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If transparency was the main issue, adding transparency to JPEG sounds easier than coming up with a completely new encoding, especially a lossy one.

How? Do you know how many binaries link to some old version of libjpeg? You're breaking 99.9% of the world and 80% of it is stuff that can't even be recompiled, probably. In fact, JPEG 2000, which was standardized, in, well, 2000, already has transparency support, and 20 years later still have no meaningful support.

All that is true for WebP too, isn't it? If you cannot recompile a piece of software, how are you going to add WebP support to it?

And you aren't breaking it. In a theoretical world where transparency got added to JPEG, software that doesn't support it will show a fully opaque JPEG (adding transparency in a backwards compatible way isn't rocket science). Compare that to using WebP instead, where software that can't handle it won't even show the image.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#145

Post by rndgermandude » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 5:37 PM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #127

moring wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If transparency was the main issue, adding transparency to JPEG sounds easier than coming up with a completely new encoding, especially a lossy one.

How? Do you know how many binaries link to some old version of libjpeg? You're breaking 99.9% of the world and 80% of it is stuff that can't even be recompiled, probably. In fact, JPEG 2000, which was standardized, in, well, 2000, already has transparency support, and 20 years later still have no meaningful support.

Because JPEG 2000 was essentially a patent-covered mess that nobody wanted to touch

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#146

Post by derefr » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #83

donatj wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think by the nature of being the second most used browser, it's worth supporting. You don't have to like supporting it however. https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

Shades of IE6 Stockholm syndrome.

Very different problems.

Many ISVs were stuck supporting IE6 for so long—long after it went into single-digit percentage usage—not out of some vague fear that someone, somewhere still used it; but because the particular moribund enterprise clients that they wanted to sell into still used it. (Otherwise, IE6 would have been just another irrelevant minority browser, like Opera.)

Mobile Safari, meanwhile, is "still" used by 25% of people; but more importantly, iOS is used by 26% of people (52% in North America!), and those people can't actually get any other renderer than WKWebView, whether they use Safari or not.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#147

Post by Reubend » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 5:43 PM UTC

adityapatadia wrote: post #107

ASK HN: Since this discussion has come up, I would like to ask HN if you are interested for an in-depth comparison on a production workload. I run this https://www.gumlet.com which serves more than 50M images per day. We can put entire study on different image formats if HN finds it helpful. Please let us know.

Yes, I'm personally quite interested. Although more for my own curiosity than any business use case.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#148

Post by adrianmonk » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 5:47 PM UTC

mikece wrote: post #101

An implicit assumption is that "smaller file size is better" and if this discussion were about audio would probably be mp3 vs ogg vorbis... but flac is the BEST to em because I want all of the audio data in the best lossless compression scheme. As a photographer, I would like to have ALL of my image data in a losslessly compressed format as well. What is the FLAC equivalent in the photo/image space?

Some formats that are lossless: PNG, FLIF.

Some formats that have a lossless mode: TIFF, WebP, BPG, JPEG XR.

FLIF claims to have the best ratios, and they have some benchmark info on their web page (https://flif.info/).

There are other things to consider like encoding/decoding speed, compatibility, and patents/licensing.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#149

Post by MayeulC » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 5:53 PM UTC

> Only concern I have is the excessive blurring of low detail areas?

Couldn't the person who picks the compression ratio tell the encoder which part of the image is important? And even have it done automatically to some extent. If you are going to send a 5MB picture from a person at their birthday party, if feels worth it to spend a few more bits on that person than its surroundings.

Extrapolating to smartphone pictures where you generally select a focus area (and sometimes selectively blur the rest), they could use that information to keep more bits of information in this area.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#150

Post by jchw » Tue, Jun 23, 2020, 5:59 PM UTC

> I think Google’s result of 25-34% smaller files is mostly caused by the fact that they compared their WebP encoder to the JPEG reference implementation, Independent JPEG Group’s cjpeg, not Mozilla’s improved MozJPEG

Well, MozJPEG didn’t exist until four years after WebP, so I suspect that might explain why.