• qaz@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    70
    arrow-down
    9
    ·
    3 days ago

    I really don’t get the WebP hate, it’s a good format. It’s better than PNG and JPG.

    • BunScientist@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 day ago

      personally:

      • forced to be a thing by google
      • bad-ish support in some applications or places even to this day
      • always used to further reduce filesizes which means you are most of the time transcoding lossy jpgs and making them more lossy (lemmy is specially into this), which means that the alleged better quality is actually useless

      jxl would make a better replacement for this last thing since you can losslessly transcody jpgs with ~20% filesize and in my testing, pngs with ~50% (though jxl lossless decoding is cpu heavy right now), lossless transcoding also means you could keep jxls in server, then give it to the client if it supports jxl, or transcode back to jpg if they don’t (this saves bandwidth and storage at the cost of some cpu usage, but jpg transcoding is really fast and you can cache highly used images)

    • Laser@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      41
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      3 days ago

      Though you couldn’t set the bar any lower without it turning into a joke.

      Anyhow, to quote Wikipedia:

      Comparing different encodings (JPEG, x264, and WebP) of a reference image, she stated that the quality of the WebP-encoded result was the worst of the three, mostly because of blurriness on the image. […] In October 2013, Josh Aas from Mozilla Research published a comprehensive study of current lossy encoding techniques and was not able to conclude that WebP outperformed JPEG by any significant margin

      All while having significantly increased complexity. The blurriness problem was inherited from the video codec webp was based on. When you can’t beat an 18 years old format, don’t be surprised when people get irritated when you use your position to get it mandated into a standard, while later stalling actual improvements (JPEG XL).

      • lemmyknow@lemmy.today
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        2 days ago

        Is JXL in actual use? Is it supported? I reckon it’s quite new, innit? D’you happen to.know how it compares to its peers?

        • Laser@feddit.org
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          19
          ·
          2 days ago

          It’s not supported by either Chromium or Firefox, which is part of the issue (Google basically decided against it with arguments that are much better suited against WebP, which they pushed some years ago).

          There aren’t that many static image codec comparisons, for example there is https://giannirosato.com/blog/post/image-comparison/. https://afontenot.github.io/image-formats-comparison/ doesn’t even include WebP because the test suite uses features unsupported by it (YUV 4:4:4). In the ones I do find, WebP usually wins against good JPEG at low bitrates, but loses on high bitrates because of the blurriness issue. They both get beaten by JPEG XL and AVIF. Which one is better probably depends on whom you ask. The before linked comparison prefers JPEG XL by a slim margin, https://tonisagrista.com/blog/2023/jpegxl-vs-avif/ strongly favors JPEG XL.

        • Venia Silente@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          14
          arrow-down
          4
          ·
          2 days ago

          Open is not the same as patent-free, the two things can coexist (and they do in the case of webp).

          It’s open to write the code, but in order to be authorized to use it you have to get a permit from Google. You can’t eg.: fork from Firefox and use their permit (as you implicitly could with patent-free). Plus, Google can rescind their patent grant at any point, which they are bound to do once they secure ownership of the internet.

              • hperrin@lemmy.ca
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                1 day ago

                I didn’t say it was patent free, and the text doesn’t say “unless we say so”. It explicitly says the only way the patent grants can be revoked is if you enter patent litigation or enforcement regarding this code.

                If you or your agent or exclusive licensee institute or order or agree to the institution of patent litigation or any other patent enforcement activity against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any of these implementations of WebM or any code incorporated within any of these implementations of WebM constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, or inducement of patent infringement, then any patent rights granted to you under this License for these implementations of WebM shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.

                That is still a problem, but what I was responding to:

                It’s open to write the code, but in order to be authorized to use it you have to get a permit from Google. You can’t eg.: fork from Firefox and use their permit (as you implicitly could with patent-free). Plus, Google can rescind their patent grant at any point, which they are bound to do once they secure ownership of the internet.

                is just wrong.

                I have no problem with calling out Google’s anticompetitive behaviors, even in this case, but don’t lie about it.

      • qaz@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        2 days ago

        Yes, but that is actually almost “incompatible with every app and website”

        • Venia Silente@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          2 days ago

          A file format can not, by itself, be “incompatible” with a website. What matters is the browser, and Firefox at least is adding support (slowly), and they are the ones who matter ATM.

        • Venia Silente@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          2 days ago

          It does, yes, but from what I gather it’s rather difficult to actually encode such an animated image compared to, say, a GIF. Display should work just fine.

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      2 days ago

      PNG is lossless, so isn’t that like comparing apples to oranges?

      Edit: Apparently webp can also be lossless. I don’t know anything.

    • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      19
      arrow-down
      7
      ·
      3 days ago

      It’s just tech illiterate being “oh no my image program not open this 10 year old new format”