Alliance for Open Media codecs

[HerpaDerp]

Originally Posted by LigH

Imagine, I once found a website which specialized in offering images in WebP format and was not just a format promoting site.

One.

User acceptance is hard to predict. If it doesn't offer more important advantages than just bandwidth saving (in times of VDSL and 4G), there may not be much incentive to use it. Just remember the overhead of external JavaScript modules required to keep your own source small.

I've been improving a website for a customer off/on for the past year. One of the goals was to create product pages that showed high resolution, high quality images with alpha transparency overlayed on top of a fixed background image, so that it makes the product "pop" and look impressive when the user scrolls down the page.

I quickly ran into a roadblock where, JPEG wouldn't work because it doesn't support alpha transparency. GIF will get you close, but it's either fully opaque, or fully transparent. PNG in my instance resulted anywhere from 800KB to 1.5MB per image, and with some pages containing 20+ images, you can see how this would be a problem for mobile users.

So, my solution was to provide WebP to Chrome users on both Desktop and Android, and provide a fallback of Quantized (Lossy) PNG for Firefox, Edge, Internet Explorer, and basically any browser that doesn't support WebP.

This resulted in a massive bandwidth reduction for the user, which caused the page to load 10-15 seconds faster on 4G.

Now, you mentioned you once found a website that specialized in offering images in WebP, and I can name a big one right off the top of my head: Netflix. They in fact, provide WebP to Chrome users.

Facebook at one point dabbled with WebP, but due to the nature of users wanting to download pictures, I think they ended up upsetting people more than making them happy, since WebP is a bad format to serve to people wanting to make local backups of their files.

Now, WebP is really not the best format, but it solved a big problem for me on Chrome, especially since it captures more than 60% of the total browser marketshare. I'm not making that number up.

A big problem with WebP is that it suffers from generation loss, and for certain situations, it can produce a significantly worse looking image than JPEG, which is why it's paramount that you don't choose a quality lower than 80%.

I looked into FLIF image format, which as of right now, is supported by absolutely nobody. It's some new fangled format that shunts the most important bits to the the beginning of the image so that if you downloaded a mere 10KB of a 2MB image, you could still view a low resolution version of it, which quite frankly is awesome.

The see several immediate problems with FLIF.
1. Files take a horrendous amount of time to create if they're greater than 2048x2048px in dimensions because it's doing all sorts of color sorting and algorithms to achieve the best filesize. Time to create the file increases exponentially with dimension. We're talking 5+ minutes to create a 4096x4096 FLIF image. Also, I have been unsuccessful in creating 16bit FLIF files, but that could just be a limitation of XNViewMP. Not sure.

2. It doesn't actually solve filesize problem for mobile users. Hypothetically speaking, if you put 30 FLIF files on your web page, each of which amounts to 2MB in file size, then you're forcing the user to download 60MB of pictures. The only benefit they get is the ability to view the image before they've finished downloading, but this just simply inflates the filesize of the page enormously, and causes other files to queue during the page load time. At the end of the day, serving your users smaller images ( less than 1MB in filesize) is the absolute best way to achieve fast page load time.

3. Animated FLIF is fantastic if you have less than 30 second recordings, but if you go beyond that, it quickly becomes impractical because the user would still have to download a mega amount of data just to be able to begin displaying the image. So, at the end of the day, you're still far better off using a video codec for anything exceeding 30 seconds.... and we now have an absolute wealth of services that do exactly that (imgur, gfycat, etc). Animated FLIF is a neat proof of concept, but I see almost no practical use for it other than being able embed fast previewing short animated images into a product page... which tbh, I would probably be the one in 100,000 website developers taking advantage of that feature. lol... Right now, my current method of doing animated video is to overlay a VP9 WebM for Firefox and Chrome users, and then fallback to animated GIF for Edge / IE users. What a pain the neck, but hey it works.

4. A 30KB partial download of a FLIF looks SIGNIFICANTLY worse than WebP, Jpeg, BPG, or any new fangled image format that is saved at the exact same filesize. FLIF is fantastic looking once the full data has been received, but looks quite terrible for partial downloads if you're comparing them to already existing image formats saved at the exact same filesize.

5. If web browsers ever become intelligent enough to download "only" the bits needed for optimal viewing experience, what we will end up with, is a bunch of partial downloads sitting in our browser cache, which means if user resizes their web browser, or zooms the image, then the browser will have to request the additional data from the webserver, which means, you can end up having multiple requests for the same image... and web servers operators HATE multiple requests. They would rather you get the full file the first time, than to bog down their servers with multiple requests for the same file.

I could go on and on and on.

But what we need, is not FLIF. We need an alternative image format, that reduces file size, has features, does not suffer from generation loss, is fast to create files, and in every way shape or form, replaces JPEG and PNG. FLIF does not replace JPEG and PNG. It's great, but it doesn't resolve the 5 issues I mentioned above.

And unfortunately, AV1 probably has TERRIBLE generation loss because using similar tech as WebP, and I can almost guarantee, it will suffer from the same problems. Nevertheless, if an AV1 image format became available to use in Chrome, I would switch to it simply because I like better things.

Anyway, just thought I'd like to share. lol