Google Upgrades WebP To Challenge PNG Image Format 249
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."
Is google's image format ICC capable? (Score:5, Interesting)
... because Chrome is STILL NOT color managed.
If the emphasis is on compression... (Score:4, Interesting)
...doesn't anyone think it might be time to revisit fractal image compression [ucsd.edu] and maybe look at ways of improving iterated function systems and their associated algorithms (I might give Mike Barnsley a call and ask him how his IFS patents are developing if you're nice and mod me up)?
An even better way to decrease page load time: (Score:5, Interesting)
It's been a long time coming (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:NIH (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:NIH (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
are image standards too established? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:NIH (Score:4, Interesting)
The images you get from Image Search are Google's version of the image which have been resized to fit the search layout. I would still be surprised if that made Google the number 1, I would have thought Akamai would be the top slot, or Facebook.
Re:Awesome (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It's been a long time coming (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't have to save full 32-bit PNG. 8-bit PNG supports full alpha as well -- in all applications except Photoshop.
See http://pngmini.com/ [pngmini.com] or https://github.com/pornel/improved-pngquant [github.com]
4% Compression? (Score:3, Interesting)
Using 37 topographic map png images ranging from 307K to 1.6M, the best compression I got was 4.09%
Typical compression was roughly 1.7%
In no way was I able to get 24% or anything close to that. But maybe I'm doing it wrong...
There is more to the world than the web. (Score:4, Interesting)
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 key word here is "converting."
H.264 is a core technology in digital video with 1,081 licensees. AVC/H.264 Licensees [mpegla.com]
Studio production.
Broadcast, cable and satellite distribution. Industrial applications. Home video.
You can play Google's YouTube transcode in your browser. WebM may find an anchorage in video chat.
But that is pretty much all you can do with WebM right now.
There is no such thing as amatuer or studio grade production hardware. No such thing as a WebM security camera.
Re:NIH (Score:4, Interesting)
TIFF used to be this way, where TIFF actually means it can be compressed like ten different ways and support was very mixed.
TIFFs still are this way, it just seems like everything is "all better" because people throw up their hands and use libtiff, which actually handles a large fraction of the weird shit that's out there. If there were not a peculiar group of masochists who decided this was something worth tackling things would seem quite different. If you wanted to sit down and write a TIFF library yourself that was actually capable of loading a majority of TIFF files out there, you'd spend years doing it.
If you don't believe me, look inside libtiff. "Initialize Thunderscan! To the turrets!"