Slashdot Mirror
Google Upgrades WebP To Challenge PNG Image Format
New submitter more writes with news that Google has added to its WebP image format the ability to losslessly compress images, and to do so with a substantial reduction in file size compared to the PNG format. Quoting:
"Our main focus for lossless mode has been in compression density and simplicity in decoding. On average, we get a 45% reduction in size when starting with PNGs found on the web, and a 28% reduction in size compared to PNGs that are re-compressed with pngcrush and pngout. Smaller images on the page mean faster page loads."
... because Chrome is STILL NOT color managed.
block google analytics.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
As someone who would love to use variable transparency (translucency) pictures on my own website, this story is very cool news. For one thing, it allows pictures to have drop shadows on varied backgrounds, without having to be forced to save as full 32bit PNG.
I'm now somewhat disappointed PNG didn't get this far sooner. It's served its purpose well over time, but I didn't realize there was still so much room for compression.
Congrats to Google, and I hope the other browser quickly adopt this apparently great picture format. I wonder how its animation side compares to APNG or MNG. The PC has always been gasping for decent lossless animation support, even though the Amiga 20 years ago had seemingly a dozen animation formats to choose from. Also, web browsers have (or at least had) great difficulty in playing animations at higher than around 16-25fps (apart from flash). It's a pretty sad state of affairs all round really.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
JPEG XR produces images similar to JPEG-2000 while having complexity similar to JPEG, supports transparencies, requires support for lossless compression (unlike JPEG) since lossless is just a quantizer setting, and it's already supported by IE9.
That last bit is probably the most important part. IE's marketshare is shrinking, but it's still big enough that any format it doesn't support is unlikely to see widespread support as the only format available for a site. I doubt IE will ever support WebP, and as such, no website will ever really be able to use WebP. Not unless they do browser detection, and most sites won't bother with multiple image compression formats, they're going to pick the best common one they can, which is currently PNG or JPEG.
Remember PNG alpha support... Until IE supported it, nobody really used it. Once IE did, it became mainstream.
Which is not actually that helpful, because then you have tons of PNG-capable applications that can't read PNGs. TIFF used to be this way, where TIFF actually means it can be compressed like ten different ways and support was very mixed.
Only ten different ways? Back in the early 90s I was creating TIFF files that I doubt anyone can display these days; we had our own TIFF tags assigned and could compress files however we wanted to.
This is why TIFF was:
1. Very useful for app developers.
2. A total disaster for interoperability.
As someone who rooted for the adoption of JPEG2000, I wonder, have we reached the point where the existing major image formats are 'good enough' and so established that new standards are unlikely to unseat them?
They are converting all of youtube to WebM, and it is the only royalty free web video codec. I'm pretty sure they will beat h.264 in the long run because free wins in the end. The fact the encoding is behind the scenes doesn't matter. In a decade html5 video will be defined by webm because no one wants to license h.264 for encoding products.