Slashdot Mirror
Bellard Creates New Image Format To Replace JPEG
An anonymous reader writes Fabrice Bellard (creator of FFMPEG, QEMU, JSLinux...) proposes a new image format that could replace JPEG : BPG. For the same quality, files are about half the size of their JPEG equivalents. He released libbpg (with source) as well as a JS decompressor, and set up a demo including the famous Lena image.
Because the new half-the-size JPEG files wouldn't work with old JPEG editors/viewers.
Bandwidth still matters for mobile, so smaller images of the same quality are quite welcome on mobile sites and apps.
Given that the developing world is likely to get online via wireless solutions, bandwidth is going to matter for a lot of people for a long time to come.
Yesterday it worked; today it is not working; Windows is like that...
I don't think we should compare BPG with JPEG, since it is very outdated. I wonder how it stacks against WebP - does it also support animation? Better compression? Licenses? Faster encoding/decoding? Browser manufacturer support? I'm all for making web more optimal, because you can never have "fast-enough" bandwidth, especially on a mobile device in bad connection area, but lets compare similar things.
You and your friends who can get decent bandwidth, can afford decent smartphones and who can afford to just throw down an additional 2 euro a month for said bandwidth are, you may be surprised to hear, not representative of everyone. For example, the average internet connection speed in Algeria is about 0.94Mb/s. I'm pretty sure most people there are also not wandering around with the latest LTE enabled phone either.