what are .webp files and why has my online experience been plagued by them?
I don't know what a .webp file is but I don't like it. They're like a filthy prank version of the image/gif you're looking for. They make you jump through all these hoops to find the original versions of the files that you can actually do anything with.
Edit: honestly I assumed it had something to do with Google protecting themselves from image piracy shit
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You would like it if you had slow internet, or you hosted a website.
My website turned 5MB images into 100KB images using webp. My website now loads instantly, saves you bandwidth, and me costs!
Wait really? Are they that much more efficient?
Yep! Not least of all, GIF & JPEG are over 30 year old formats and WebP is about a decade old. So there's at least 20 years of advancement there
JPEG-XL has been out for three years, and is better and more efficient than any other image format on the market. Google just has been insisting on keeping them off the web because they want to push WebP instead.
That means absolutely nothing. We went to the moon with hardware that had ram in kilobytes. Today you need a supercomputer from the 70s to run the add of a Web page.
Progress is not linear. C is still used everywhere while some other languages didn't live a tenth of its age. New is not always better.
The reasons for this is that computing power is cheap but developers are expensive.
Yeah for sure, new is not always better.
Though for compressed media file formats, that pretty much has been the correlation for a while (though obviously there's many different conflicting qualities that can make a file format "good" for various purposes)
Take video for example: MPEG2 came along and MPEG quickly became uncommon within a couple of years. MPEG4 displaced MPEG2 due to being more efficient. DivX/AVC replaced that for the same reasons and HVEC/VP9 replaced that. We've got AV1 coming now that looks to have beaten h.266/VVC to the punch, but it's still a fairly linear progression of improvement.
Given all that it's kind of mad we've not seen the same level of iteration on image file formats, but that's almost entirely down to browser wars and having to pick lowest common denominators. JPEG2000 might have taken off if it wasn't for the fact only Apple ever implemented it in a browser—it was definitely a technically better format.
I wouldn't say that. Maybe youtube uses it by default (I don't know, though) but a lot of other sites still use H264.
And I don't see AV1 even on the horizon.
A couple of years ago (2?) I tried converting some of my huge H264 video files to AV1 with then up to date ffmpeg. It was horrendously slow. I don't remember the numbers but I'm pretty sure it was progressing much slower than the clock.
It's due to the maths behind. Special algebra is used for video compression, and a discovery has been made something like 15 years ago that allows a better video compression. It fueled technical progresses of the last years.
For images, we basically hit the wall quite some time ago. The new technologies are more about engineering improvement than math improvement.
Then there is the technical environment. It doesn't matter if your technology is a bit better than the old one because the cost to change the whole technical environment is insane. That's why ipv4 is still there for example. Changing everything for a new technology to be used is a long, costly and painful progress. But this is something only developpers can't cope with, because the development culture is painfully ignorant of industry constraints and time lines.
Lol I still don't really understand ipv6 and I work in IT. Ipv4 is so much easier and nicer to work with
Huh, TIL!
No.
Yes.
Would you like to explain why you say no?
Because you're implying that it's 50x more efficient than jpeg, it's not. For similar visual quality of images webp will on average produce a ~30% smaller file.
WebP files are usually only 24-35% smaller https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/docs/webp_study
The real question is the hell did people downvote me? Looks like Lemmy turned into Reddit in a month's time...
You shut someone down without informing or educating them on a text based discussion centric community with an academic stick up its ass. A one word response to a complex technical question is terrible etiquette in this sort of social environment.
So... Reddit, ok.
Next time lead with the why instead of a one word "no". This is a discussion forum, nobody knows who you are and certainly nobody is taking your word as truth if you don't provide evidence.
It should be obvious why to any person.
Bruh..
5mb to 100kb is not a typical result, so I would imagine that you are comparing apples to oranges (e.g. a very high quality jpeg vs a low quality webp)