Google Releases New Image Format Called WebP 378
An anonymous reader writes "Google has released WebP, a lossy image format based on the image encoding used by VP8 (the video codec used in Google's WebM video format) to compress keyframes. According to the FAQ, WebP achieves an average 39% more compression than JPEG and JPEG 2000 while maintaining image quality. A gallery on the WebP homepage has a selection of images which compare the original JPEG image with the WebP encoded image shown as a PNG. There's no information available yet on which browsers will support the WebP image format, but I imagine it will be all the browsers which currently have native WebM support — Firefox, Chrome, and Opera."
Independent analysis of WebP is available from a few different sources.
Microsoft releases a new image format called WebP (Score:4, Funny)
Apparently over at TG Daily Emma Woollacott [tgdaily.com] thinks WebP is a Microsoft innovation. They've also reassigned Richard Rabbat to Redmond, which will probably be quite a surprise to him.
Meanwhile, in 2016 when the IE team gets around to implementing this image format they'll find a way to put an exploitable buffer overflow into it.
Re:Not as Sharp (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, it'll be interesting to see the results once people do some blind studies on this
Blind people probably can't tell the difference between JPEG and WebP, but I don't think that's much of a selling point...
Rendering Speed (Score:3, Funny)
On my system, the WebP images take seconds to render, where the jpegs are near instant. This delay is even more noticeable on the last image of the tug boat. I know the memory/cpu trade-off laws, but is this trade-off worth it now? Will this format have to wait until people have better CPUs? They said they put the WebP images in a PNG container, is that affecting rendering speed?
(I have some random Intel Duo, Chrome, Win7, on a FiOS line.)
Re:Sounds like a business opportunity to me (Score:2, Funny)
Audiophiles don't use iPods. Crappy EQ. ;)
Re:Is it free or is there intellectual encumbermen (Score:3, Funny)
No no, you're missing the point. People here only care about something being free if it gives them the chance to bash microsoft or apple. This would only give them oportunity to bash google, so it's inaplicable.
Re:Sounds like a business opportunity to me (Score:3, Funny)
You'd be surprised what some use.
E.g., I remember one case from another board who was hearing differences in sound quality when playing MP3's off different hard drives in his computer. And no, he didn't mean the HDD's own noise. He was convinced that it's like on the old cassettes, where different kinds of tape (e.g., iron vs chrome) had different frequency responses. So it stood to reason to him that some HDD's have better bass than others.
Re:Not as Sharp (Score:4, Funny)
A music track exists to sound good, so degradation of quality transitively degrades its' purpose.
Have you heard pop music recently?
Re:Sounds like a business opportunity to me (Score:5, Funny)
It's a known fact* that electricity from hydro has a smoother, more natural sound than electricity from nuke plants. Coal is somewhere in the middle of the two.
I've heard people claim "Most people can't tell the difference between .01 and .05 THD, but I can." Which is like saying "Most people can't read the surgeon general's warning on a pack of cigarettes from a half mile away, but I can."
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*among wacky "audiophiles".
Re:Sounds like a business opportunity to me (Score:5, Funny)
Nuclear power is great for Heavy Metal, but I always ask my power company to switch me to green electricity before listening to Irish music.
Re:Not as Sharp (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Slashdot Experiment Time! (Score:3, Funny)
Any good php hacker should be able to whip this up in about an hour. I'd do it, but I've got work to do.
I'm sure you'll spend an hour after work then. Thanks!
JPEG XR (Score:1, Funny)
There's already a better alternative to JPEG that's more advanced than WebP. Microsoft's HD Photo is now JPEG XR, and it's out there now. It's implemented in IE9, so there won't be any struggles to get Microsoft to adopt it. Yes there are patents on JPEG XR, but Microsoft is making the specification open and letting anybody implement it that wants to. There are no legal problems to implementing open source encoders and decoders for the format, so there's no reason except blind Microsoft hatred to not add JPEG XR support to every web browser and make it the new standard.
Re:Microsoft releases a new image format called We (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently over at TG Daily Emma Woollacott thinks WebP is a Microsoft innovation.
She fixed that oversight. But now she seems to think that Google Chrome is a Microsoft product:
"...but Microsoft says it's developing a patch for WebKit to provide native support for WebP in an upcoming release of Google Chrome."
Re:Microsoft releases a new image format called We (Score:2, Funny)