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Is WebP really better than JPEG?

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Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#61

Post by yboris »

Obligatory mention of FLIF [0], FUIF [1], pik [2], and JPEG XL [3] as well as Jon Sneyers

FLIF & FUIF were created by Jon Sneyers - http://sneyers.info/ and are lossless but progressive, generating better resulting images at every step of the image download and brilliant mobile support (your browser can just stop downloading the image once it reaches the quality sufficient for the viewport).

A new update on the JPEG XL is worth reading:

--> https://cloudinary.com/blog/how_jpeg_xl_compares_to_other_im...

[0] http://flif.info/ -- superseded by FUIF

[1] https://cloudinary.com/blog/fuif_new_legacy_friendly_image_f... -- FLIF is lossless and amazing, in part absorbed by JPEG XL

[2] https://github.com/google/pik - from Google, got absorbed by JPEG XL

[3] https://cloudinary.com/blog/how_jpeg_xl_compares_to_other_im...

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#62

Post by reaperducer »

unnouinceput wrote: post #58

Summary: - No. It's roughly the same. Mandatory Google bash comment: - It's mainly another wheel reinvention from Google, because reasons.

Mandatory Google bash comment: - It's mainly another wheel reinvention from Google, because reasons.

Pithy comment, and reaction, aside, that's enough to give me pause about implementing it.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#64

Post by unnouinceput »

acdha wrote: post #29
buboard wrote: post #16

chrome keeps changing downloaded images to webP which is annoyin af. can't even find a way to disable it

Are you sure that’s Chrome and not a website which selects the format based on the client’s advertised capabilities? I know Facebook did that and it confused a lot of people when a .jpg wasn’t a JPEG.

For me was the same problem on Chrome. Switched to Firefox, same sites are happy to let me save their images as .jpeg instead of .webp

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#65

Post by chungus_khan »

Y-bar wrote: post #49
izacus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a proprietary patent-encumbered format which isn't really widely supported in the web browsers.

Patent-encumbered? Yes. > proprietary No. It is an open standard (ISO/IEC 23008)

Being patent-encumbered kind of makes it moot on the web though, just like H.265 video.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#66

Post by zmix »

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 browsers with a small Javascript decoder (gzipped size: 56 KB).
  * Based on a subset of the HEVC open video compression standard.
  * Supports the same chroma formats as JPEG (grayscale, YCbCr 4:2:0, 4:2:2, 4:4:4) to reduce the losses during the 
  conversion. An alpha channel is supported. The RGB, YCgCo and CMYK color spaces are also supported.
  * Native support of 8 to 14 bits per channel for a higher dynamic range.
  * Lossless compression is supported.
  * Various metadata (such as EXIF, ICC profile, XMP) can be included.
  * Animation support.
[1] https://bellard.org/bpg/

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#67

Post by microcolonel »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #12

I just relaunched a website that makes extensive use of photographic collages that necessitate alpha backgrounds. They were previously shipping "retina-grade", multi-megabyte images all over, a typical page load could easily reach 25mb. I managed to refit it with ` ` tags using WEBP as well as JP2. The latter was a great deal of trouble, it appears that "the community" (notably Gatsby and Contentful) are very happy t…

> I bring this both to point out that there is a very valid reason to use WebP over JPEG — alpha blending — and that this entire field is still a gigantic mess.

Yeah, you can do manual alpha masking in webkit, but it's freaky and stupid.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#68

Post by floatingatoll »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #12

I just relaunched a website that makes extensive use of photographic collages that necessitate alpha backgrounds. They were previously shipping "retina-grade", multi-megabyte images all over, a typical page load could easily reach 25mb. I managed to refit it with ` ` tags using WEBP as well as JP2. The latter was a great deal of trouble, it appears that "the community" (notably Gatsby and Contentful) are very happy t…

On iOS, any screenshot taken while iOS background blur is active will balloon from 0.15MB to 15.0MB, because iOS uses PNG for screenshots and blurred backgrounds are apparently irreducible by PNG.

Does the WebP format permit bounded areas of an image to be represented at lower fidelity with a smooth blur, so that the blurred-background effect can be stored and retrieved using fewer pixels and a blur algorithm rather than more pixels and no blur algorithm? Do PNG or HEIF (h265) support this? Does any image format support bounded areas of lower fidelity?

The tricky part is that this implies that some areas of the image should intentionally be reproduced as ‘lossy’ and ‘lower fidelity’ and so forth, which is precisely correct - but goes against the grain of image encoding in the past.

Re: Is WebP really better than JPEG?

#70

Post by cercatrova »

andrewxdiamond wrote: post #53
rakoo wrote: post #43

Extremely subjective, personal data point: I've been running with an extension ( https://bandwidth-hero.com/ ) that compresses all images (including jpeg) and renders them in webp. I'm a typical social networks browser, so among the images I see a high majority of them don't need high quality. I'm running the extension with max compression but still keep colors: compression artifacts are clearly visible, but in my op…

How does an extension resize an image without downloading it? Can it selectively read bytes from the stream?

It uses a proxy server as said on the landing page. That said, the service is shut down apparently so you have to self-host your own proxy server. That's not too useful for me so I uninstalled the extension.
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