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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.

21 of 378 comments (clear)

  1. Microsoft releases a new image format called WebP by symbolset · · Score: 4, Funny

    Apparently over at TG Daily Emma Woollacott thinks WebP is a Microsoft innovation. They've also reassigned Richard Rabbat to Redmond, which will probably be quite a surprise to him.

    Meanwhile, in 2016 when the IE team gets around to implementing this image format they'll find a way to put an exploitable buffer overflow into it.

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    Help stamp out iliturcy.
  2. 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 m2pc · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?

    2. 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.
    3. Re:Not as Sharp by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Informative

      The images from the x264 comparison are the most striking. In particular, compare the parasol. With the H.264 keyframe, you can see the spokes and the structure. With the JPEG version, there's some macroblocking, but the features are detectable. With the WebP one, it is just a red circle. The rest of the image is similar.

      This is really a shame. Replacing JPEG is probably worthwhile - it's an ancient standard in computing terms. It comes from 1992, making it about the same age as the web. We have almost two decades of image encoding research to build on since then and, almost as importantly, computers are now much more powerful. The first web browser I used was on a 386, which was just about fast enough that the modem was the bottleneck when decoding JPEG images. Now, decoding even large JPEG images doesn't tax my CPU, so we have a lot more cycles to play with for efficient compression. Things like JPEG-2000 provide this, but because they're newer there is a potential for submarine patents to cause problems for them (as happened with GIF).

      The problem with replacing JPEG is the install base. Every graphical web browser since Mosaic has been able to view JPEG images. None can see your new standard (without a plugin). No existing image editors or cameras can generate your new standard (without an external program). Remember how difficult it was for PNG adoption, and that was with the threat of patent lawsuits for encoders.

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      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    4. 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.

    5. Re:Not as Sharp by DarkIye · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Eh? The pixels you refer to are only slightly darker, not black.

      .

      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!

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    6. Re:Not as Sharp by fractoid · · Score: 4, Funny

      I dunno about you but I'm using a Monster(TM) brand DVI cable so I get superior native image resolution on my LCD and 11 bits of resolution per colour channel. I can clearly see the difference between the two formats and one of them is vastly superior.

      --
      Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
  3. Great. So? by ceoyoyo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. 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.

    1. Re:Well... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Well... by Cornelius+the+Great · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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
  5. Re:Halo by kill-1 · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's because the scaled down preview JPEGs are compressed twice which is completely idiotic of course. Check out the unscaled images for the real deal.

  6. What a load a crap by suso · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. Compression and quality aren't the real problem by Aphoxema · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Something suspiciously absent is any mentioning of license. I don't think it is necessary for me to describe why that's a problem.

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    "Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
  8. Re:Lenna image not shown?????? by am+2k · · Score: 4, Informative

    Great that you have read the article you apparantly did look at:

    The photos are licensed under a Creative Commons License. Famous classic images such as Lena, the Baboon, etc., often used when doing compression comparisons, are unfortunately not free of copyright.

  9. Re:Rendering Speed by clone53421 · · Score: 5, Informative

    They didn’t put WebP images in a PNG container. They compressed them as WebP, decompressed them, and then saved the raw pixels as PNG. PNG itself is a lossless format, so any differences you see between the JPEG and the PNG were introduced by the WebP compression. The PNG image is also on an order of 10x larger than the JPEG, which is why it takes longer to download/render on your computer...

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    Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
  10. Re:Sounds like a business opportunity to me by Hittman · · Score: 5, Funny
    What kind of electricity was he using?

    It's a known fact* that electricity from hydro has a smoother, more natural sound than electricity from nuke plants. Coal is somewhere in the middle of the two.

    I've heard people claim "Most people can't tell the difference between .01 and .05 THD, but I can." Which is like saying "Most people can't read the surgeon general's warning on a pack of cigarettes from a half mile away, but I can."

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    *among wacky "audiophiles".

  11. 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.

  12. Re:Sounds like a business opportunity to me by LordVader717 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Nuclear power is great for Heavy Metal, but I always ask my power company to switch me to green electricity before listening to Irish music.

  13. Re:Microsoft releases a new image format called We by StormReaver · · Score: 4, Funny

    Apparently over at TG Daily Emma Woollacott thinks WebP is a Microsoft innovation.

    She fixed that oversight. But now she seems to think that Google Chrome is a Microsoft product:

    "...but Microsoft says it's developing a patch for WebKit to provide native support for WebP in an upcoming release of Google Chrome."