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Google Releases New Image Format Called WebP

Posted by Soulskill on from the pixelating-the-web dept.

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.

5 of 378 comments (clear)

  1. Not as Sharp by Saint+Stephen · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I can visibly see a difference in ALL the pictures. The WebP version is slightly murkier and less shows less detail than the JPEG version.

    It's like people say you can't hear the difference in suitably high-bit rate MP3, but I can - in the cymbals - they're not as bright as CD or FLAC.

    This is kind of like that. It's ALMOST pretty great, but it's not as great. I guess if we all lower our expectations, we can get used to it.

    1. Re:Not as Sharp by GreyWolf3000 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I disagree with this. A music track exists to sound good, so degradation of quality transitively degrades its' purpose. However, not every image on the web was designed to be an artistic masterpiece. For most use cases, smaller filesize for slight drop in quality is a reasonable tradeoff. You can still use PNG for the stuff that you want to render just a certain way; remember, most of us have monitors that inject their own "noise" into the color spectrum of the photos we're watching. Besides, this is all up to the guy (or gal) hosting the website. Since (presumably) it's their content, I think it's fair that they have the choice to choose the quality/compression level that both saves bandwidth costs and looks good.

      --
      Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
    2. Re:Not as Sharp by mcvos · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I can visibly see a difference in ALL the pictures. The WebP version is slightly murkier and less shows less detail than the JPEG version.

      More accurately, WebP doesn't invent any additional detail. Look at the second image. Lots of artifacts on the background around his head. The WebP version is sharper, has less artifacts, and is a whopping 75% smaller.

      Clearly WebP is especially good at photos with large areas of the same colour, something that JPEG has always been incredibly bad at.

  2. Well... by sweffymo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Meh. I always use PNG anyway. With the advent of faster web connections, there is no need for more compression.

  3. Slashdot Experiment Time! by goodmanj · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you already know which is WebP and which is JPG, you're unavoidably biased. We're not going to settle this without a blind trial.

    Slashdot hackers! Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to write a little website which encodes a series of raw never-been-compressed images as WebP and JPG of equal sizes, presents both side-by-side to the user, and has them click on the one they think is "better". Do not label which image is which: randomize them. Collect statistics and present the data on the site.

    Any good php hacker should be able to whip this up in about an hour. I'd do it, but I've got work to do.