this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023

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Begun, the format war has (lemmy.world)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2207898

Did you ever hear the tragedy of WebP The Efficient? I thought not. It’s not a story the GIF gang would tell you. It’s an image legend.

WebP was a new format of pictures, so efficient and so lightweight, it could use modern compression to influence the web pages to actually load faster…

It had such a knowledge of the user's needs that it could even keep transparency and animations from dying.

The power of modern computing is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.

It became so widespread… The only thing we had to be afraid of, was people insisting on using formats from the 90's, which eventually, of course, they did.

Unfortunately, we didn't teach the noobs everything we knew about compression, then the noobs killed the format by converting it to PNG and sharing that.

Ironic. We could save the web from being too slow, but not from the users.

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[–] [email protected] 76 points 11 months ago (13 children)

The only problem I have with .webp and .webm is that not that many applications support them and need to be converted first.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 11 months ago

This. Many viewers still dont support it for some reason so despite all technical glory, effectively its often mostly a nuisance. Cmp ogg/vorbis and possibly countless other examples. Adoption is everything for web formats.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (3 children)

No, there's also the problem that they're Google developed formats. I think an increasing number of us want to be done with Google as much as possible, and there are good alternatives that aren't getting the support they need right now to give us that freedom.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

I hate Google too, but if they are proper open specification formats and aren't encumbered by patents, why does it matter that Google created them? Open format is open format regardless of its creator.

Do these formats have some DRM capability or other nefarious reason to avoid them or is it just because they were created by someone we don't like?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I understand that but we really fucking need to be moving from jpegif. MP3 and MPEG2 were commercial formats too (actually so was jpeg iirc?) and look where they got us. We just really need someone to get the ball rolling to start using newer formats.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

That's like saying that I don't want to develop using react.js because it was created by Meta.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Ofcourse I know him. He's me

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Kill him. Kill him now.

Seriously.... Please don't. Or at least don't ever share that shit back to the web. It gets even worse when people then rename the png to jpg and it's a whole fucking mess. I've been trying to figure out where the hell all those bloated hi-res pngs all over the web come from, until I stumbled upon this answer.

Just download an updated app that can read webp for crying out loud. Do people convert x265 to QuickTime too?

Besides, everywhere where I've encountered webp in the wild, the image url has something like ?format=webp at the end, so you can just delete that and get the original, if you really have to.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

It was on by default for me, but I'm also not downloading pictures to repost so it's fine.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

What client is that?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Liftoff

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

Good damn it...

I've got jerboa, thunder, wefwef... And now liftoff.

It's like I'm going for the fucking infinity gauntlet

Thanks!

Edit: STOP FUELING MY ADDICTION :'(

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (6 children)

And that's just the FOSS options

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Oof you're further down the rabbit hole I see :']

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Also try Sync for lemmy and Connect

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Haha I have the same issue with mastodon and matrix apps

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (7 children)

Webp is just one more instace of Google trying to own the modern web.

Give me JPEG XL or give me death, motherfuckers.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I prefer AVIF, it has significantly better browser support, and since AV1 is getting all the hardware support avif will benefit from this too.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

Compatibility be damned.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Anakin Skywalker : I've just learned a terrible truth. I think this Chancellor Palpatine meme is a jpeg.

Mace Windu : [suprised] A jpeg?

Anakin Skywalker : Yes, the one we've been looking for.

Mace Windu : How do you know this?

Anakin Skywalker : I saved the file and it's a jpeg, not a webp.

Mace Windu : Are you sure?

Anakin Skywalker : Absolutely.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Jpeg is not what makes the Web slow. The dozens of requests to Google and all the add services and then the add videos.

When an addblocker makes the page loads so much faster, webp is definitely not what will save Internet.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

I'm still mad over the JPEG xl drama

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

JPEG XL, the one true king.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Hold up: what drama? I thought everyone was just dragging their feet on implementing compatibility for it

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Since Chrome decided to cancel it a bunch of other software has implemented it

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The only thing I don't like about webp is it can either be lossy or lossless, with png and jpg you know if it's lossless or not.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Unfortunately there are lots of jpegs resaved or screenshotted to png out there, so that doesn't help if you don't know the history of the file.

Heck, there are even lots such pngs with their extension changed to jpg, which you might not notice unless you check for details or your image viewer differentiates between various formats.

This whole thing has been a mystery for me for months and I couldn't I figure out where do such botched files come from, until I realised it's probably because people can't handle webps and so are making a mess of things.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

If you look into it a bit more, the resistance around WebP is mainly because it has some crippling weaknesses. I did some visual quality testing ( here, here & here ) & I (as well as many others independently) have found that for photographic images, WebP & JPEG are equals, & Google's messaging that lossy WebP meaningfully improves upon JPEG for general visual quality per bit is misleading. That being said, WebP has some important strengths that are not often acknowledged. In addition to transparency & (really good) animation support, it also has:

a lossless mode that often outperforms PNG
great nonphotographic compression (though AVIF outperforms it here)
decent compression of photographic sources at lower fidelity, where it actually starts to beat JPEG by a good amount
Totally royalty free

WebP's main weaknesses are:

not better than JPEG for photographic images at useful fidelity
Confusing messaging from Google, may have led to slow adoption
Based on a video codec, so no progressive decode (even JPEG has this)
limited to 8 BPC (lossy & lossless)
superseded by JPEG-XL & AVIF, which are both pretty much better at everything

JPEG-XL in particular is very promising. It faces hostility from Google but has an incredible breadth of features & strong compression performance, as well as Apple ecosystem-wide adoption on the way with the upcoming versions of macOS, iOS, ipadOS, etc. It is also royalty free. AVIF is better than WebP at everything except lossless, too.

Feeling any which way about WebP, it is still a shame to see it transcoded to PNG. All that wasted potential ...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Webp... For web pictures. Then why are there webp files on my non web harddrives? Give me PNG, SVG, JPEG and GIFs. Not this ugly Google shit. I never liked it in the first place. And take your shitty webm with you.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (2 children)

They are smaller and higher quality, why use archaeic formats?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

I just hate that Meta Messenger (where I communicate most with my friends) doesn't let me share webp images. Also it labels them as gif.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

It's still a godsend for large comic book archives. Thx comicrack for supporting this wicked new format since August 2013!

edit: there's also a relatively new plugin for avif and jpegxl support.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I've never heard anyone complain about webp before. What's the problem?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Cant seem to open it with shit after I save it

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Well if you're trying to open pictures with shit...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

That sounds like a you problem

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Waited ages for webp to have great browser support and it finally does. Plenty of image compression services let you choose a webp output which is a great space saver :)

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

What about the bot attack on the bitmaps?

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