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submitted 1 year ago by WhoRoger@lemmy.world to c/memes@lemmy.ml

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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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[-] Lexica@sh.itjust.works 92 points 1 year ago

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

[-] Droggl@lemmy.sdf.org 36 points 1 year 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.

[-] Kichae@kbin.social 25 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] WhoRoger@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

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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[-] CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year 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?

[-] HurlingDurling@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

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

[-] WhoRoger@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Why are so many people using image viewers from 1993? Nothing against nostalgia, but...

[-] funnystuff97@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

Discord doesn't support webp, that's probably one of the biggest ones.

[-] ryannathans@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

Discord profits from big inefficient formats so you buy nitro

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[-] WhoRoger@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Dammit

[-] TimeSquirrel@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Also Google Voice cannot attach webps. Literally the same company that came up with it. I gotta convert to send memes and photos to my boomer parents still using text for everything.

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[-] thekerker@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

For me, it's not image viewers, but websites that take photo uploads. None of them that I've ever used have supported webp, so I always have to convert to png or jpg.

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[-] exu@feditown.com 3 points 1 year ago

What applications are those?

[-] TwanHE@lemmy.world 40 points 1 year ago

Ofcourse I know him. He's me

[-] WhoRoger@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] TwanHE@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

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

[-] Waker@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

What client is that?

[-] Karcinogen@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 1 year ago

Liftoff

[-] Waker@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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 :'(

[-] WhoRoger@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

And that's just the FOSS options

[-] Waker@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

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

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[-] kate@lemmy.uhhoh.com 3 points 1 year ago

Haha I have the same issue with mastodon and matrix apps

[-] SwiggitySwole@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

Also try Sync for lemmy and Connect

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[-] dingus@lemmy.ml 22 points 1 year ago

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

Give me JPEG XL or give me death, motherfuckers.

[-] kate@lemmy.uhhoh.com 4 points 1 year ago

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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[-] Ineocla@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm still mad over the JPEG xl drama

[-] ISometimesAdmin@the.coolest.zone 6 points 1 year ago

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

[-] exu@feditown.com 10 points 1 year ago

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

[-] dingus@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

JPEG XL, the one true king.

[-] victron@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

Compatibility be damned.

[-] antares87@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago

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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[-] bouh@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

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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[-] gianni@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year 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 ...

[-] Klaymore@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] WhoRoger@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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.

[-] ReCursing@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

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

[-] collegefurtrader@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 year ago

Cant seem to open it with shit after I save it

[-] WhoRoger@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

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

[-] ReCursing@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

That sounds like a you problem

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[-] AnonymousLlama@kbin.social 3 points 1 year 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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[-] DmMacniel@feddit.de 3 points 1 year ago

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.