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Google Releases New Image Format Called WebP
An anonymous reader writes "Google has released WebP, a lossy image format based on the image encoding used by VP8 (the video codec used in Google's WebM video format) to compress keyframes. According to the FAQ, WebP achieves an average 39% more compression than JPEG and JPEG 2000 while maintaining image quality. A gallery on the WebP homepage has a selection of images which compare the original JPEG image with the WebP encoded image shown as a PNG. There's no information available yet on which browsers will support the WebP image format, but I imagine it will be all the browsers which currently have native WebM support — Firefox, Chrome, and Opera."
Independent analysis of WebP is available from a few different sources.
JPEG was cutting edge a couple of decades ago but it's not very hard to beat now. We still use it because everything supports it and it's good enough.
I disagree. Look at images #3 and #4. The WebP versions are clearly sharper and more detailed than their JPEG counterparts. Other than that, the rest of the images are so close it's difficult to tell which is better. For a 39% size reduction, I think WebP has a clear advantage over JPEG. Some questions remaining are a) will companies actually adopt WebP and popularize it, or will it die a quiet death, and b) how CPU and memory-intensive is the algorithm to implement compared to JPEG, especially in mobile devices with limited resources and CPU power?
Most of the formats in general use are over a decade old, and the company says that they're consistently responsible for most of the latency users experience
BULL SHIT! Images are nothing anymore. Its poor javascript coding, flash ads and all the dependent site components that are responsible for most of the experienced latency now. Images don't mean squat unless you're still on a 28.8 modem.
Also, one way you can make jpeg images smaller is to set the quality value to 75 or 80, most people won't notice the difference and the size of your image will reduce dramatically. The problem today is that people leave their images at full quality right off their camera and upload a 2MB image file when it really only needs to be 138KB. WebP won't fix that user mistake.
There's always need for more compression. It all adds up. One loser at home isn't going to care, whereas an ISP with 20 million users might. Users might care when we eventually switch over to being billed by the byte, and being stuck on slow connections like cellular networks.
Something suspiciously absent is any mentioning of license. I don't think it is necessary for me to describe why that's a problem.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Memory is a concern, especially on embedded devices. Plus, many mobile devices have built-in hardware encoding/decoding support for JPEG to minimize CPU and memory usage.
PNG is a great format, but we don't need lossless for most pictures on the net.
Rather, rather than replacing everything with PNG, the web needs a lossy image format with alpha support and ability to do lossless when needed. Oddly enough, (currently) WebP does neither...
Sigs are for losers
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I'm very impressed with WebP overall. The images are sharper and have better colour tones, and obviously lack those awful JPEG colour smudges. The resolutions are unimportant - the important thing is that WebP produces the images at the same size at similar or superior quality. They are also significantly smaller.
I'd just like this opportunity to say "fuck the shitty Slashdot comments system". Try and guess which of the myriad reasons is causing me to complain this time!
To prevent this day from getting worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD TH