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Is WebP really better than JPEG?

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241–250 of 319 posts

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#241
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari Mobile is a broken mess not worth supporting.

But it is the only browser on iOS (even if you install another browser, under the hood it MUST use the safari rendering engine, so all browser use on iOS is really Safari). Not supporting means you are not supporting any iPhone or iPad user. You might be anti-apple in your personal technology choices, but can you be anti-apple for whoever you work for?

If you're outside of the US then the answer can easily be "yes". I don't recommend it though.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#242
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> people insist on the same quality with lesser size. Because a great proportion of people browsing the web have slow connections and/or data caps. > How about more quality and the same filesize? We're already able to get acceptable quality.

>Because a great proportion of people browsing the web have slow connections and/or data caps.

That doesn't matter one bit. See "webpages are doom".

>We're already able to get acceptable quality.

Apparently not when some examples are worse.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't those patents be expiring soon? Edit: Did some more research and the patent risk appears to have passed as of 2016. Still nobody seems to have interest in JPEG2000.

It’s too compute intensive

No.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can be supported in any browser via a Javascript I think you answered your own question right there. I'm not going to use a dumptruck to bring a single sack of sand to my garden.

can is not the same as must ... there is absolutely the possibility of adding support as a binary implementation, especially with the relatively short turn around of green browsers. IE11 and Safari are the last of the old guard on this and mobile devices have a 2-3 year burnout in terms of support. Not to mention it could be feature detected via browser, js and other means as an interim solution. Also, I'm pretty sur…

It's extremely ironic then that IE11 and Safari are the only browsers to support HEVC, the rest didn't bother because of the licensing issues (which BPG inherits) severely limiting any chance it has of ever being natively supported.

AVIF however may have a chance.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is really cool. I had never thought about (ab)using SVG in that way. SVG is such an underappreciated technology that is in every browser. Why do icon fonts exist when you could just use SVGs just like you do PNGs and JPEGs? You can even inline them in your HTML so there isn't an additional HTTP request if you want.

Wouldn't it probably be one request per icon instead of just one request for a while font?

Not necessarily. You can have a single SVG file with multiple 'defs' that you can reference around the page, or just embed the SVG code in the HTML itself (via a templating language) if you're not using too many.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Shouldn't those patents be expiring soon? Edit: Did some more research and the patent risk appears to have passed as of 2016. Still nobody seems to have interest in JPEG2000.

webp was around since 2010 and has google's backing. Microsoft tried their own thing (Jpeg XR; 2009) and the actual JPEG committee announced their work Jpeg XL (with google backing) a while ago, while Apple switched to HEIC/HEIF as of 2017 (HEIC is like webp just based on HEVC aka H.265 instead of vp8 i-frames; and it's a patent mess of course).

There is simply no reason why people in 2016 or now would be interested in a format from 2000 that was a patent minefield until at least 2016.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#248
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebP also supports animation, which is important because GIFs are notoriously large.

WebM (despite being closely related to WebP) can be 5-10x more efficient than WebP. That's because WebP focused so strongly on being a GIF equivalent that it also dropped all things that made WebM efficient and instead adopted GIF's awfully inefficient architecture (just dumb frames overlaid on top of each other, without motion vectors or predicted frames). Safari shows how it can be done: it supports silent MP4/H.26…

There's also the practical matter of network speed. In many common scenarios a 300kb webm can be fully downloaded and playing while a roughly equivalent 5mb gif is paused a few frames in, buffering.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#249
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebP also supports animation, which is important because GIFs are notoriously large.

WebM (despite being closely related to WebP) can be 5-10x more efficient than WebP. That's because WebP focused so strongly on being a GIF equivalent that it also dropped all things that made WebM efficient and instead adopted GIF's awfully inefficient architecture (just dumb frames overlaid on top of each other, without motion vectors or predicted frames). Safari shows how it can be done: it supports silent MP4/H.26…

Also video decoding is cheaper because most GPU/SoCs supports hardware decoding.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#250
post #85
post #66

I wonder, why nobody mentioned Patrice Bellard's BPG[1]. It is based on HEVC and can be supported in any browser via a Javascript. From his website: BPG (Better Portable Graphics) is a new image format. Its purpose is to replace the JPEG image format when quality or file size is an issue. Its main advantages are: * High compression ratio. Files are much smaller than JPEG for similar quality. * Supported by most Web b…

This is kind of neat, but when I think of "HEVC-based image codec" I think of Apple's .heic format. Unfortunately I didn't see a high-level comparison to HEIC on Bellard's site, so I'm not sure what the advantages of BPG are. Wouldn't I want to use the more common format?

BPG came before HEIF. It was a great proof of concept, but there’s little reason for it to exist now. BPG was an impressive one-man spec; HEIF is based on input from OS developers, camera makers, IC designers, display manufacturers, etc.

HEIF is just a generic image container format. It’s almost identical in structure to a .mp4/.mov/.av1 file (follows ISO BMFF) and can be parsed in an identical way using a simple tree structure. That’s a perfect fit for wrapping a single video I-frame as an image, the basis of all of these new image codecs.

Note that video I-frames can often only be properly rendered using metadata from outside the bitstream, such as HDR characteristics, color profile, or orientation. Sharing that metadata structure with the codec’s canonical video format is the only way to be forward-compatible.

A HEIF that wraps AV1 frame(s) is an .avif

A HEIF that wraps HEVC frame(s) is a .heic

Codecs will change, but the HEIF container is probably the last bitmap file format that we’re going to need for decades.

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