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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This isn’t really relevant when webp is more optimised and smaller file size. People are determined to force things to be GIFs despite them looking terrible and taking up 50MB for 10 seconds of 720p looping video.
Oh, I forgot to mention in my other comment, as far as compression goes, what ever happened to good old MIDI? 🤔
Midi is quite literally a text format, and you can open it in anything. It's just a matter of interpretation what comes out of it.
I'm looking at a MIDI file in a hex editor right now, it's literally not a plain text file. Plain text files use carriage return and/or line feed characters to end a line of text. MIDI uses null to separate instrument notes and attributes.
Also, when was the last time you tried opening a MIDI file? Seems like half the media player apps and even some operating systems don't even natively support it anymore.
Ok apologies. But you get my point, it's a set of instructions made for actual hardware with built-in samples. I don't think there's any such thing in modern computers even beyond emulation on OS level.
Sound players are made to play sound, not instructions, and most people don't need to play MIDIs. Even so, the actual playback experience then depends on the OS/hardware/whatever, which again is not something you expect from a sound player.
You can always use specific software to play MIDIs, which are better equipped for it with stuff like MIDI font support, instrument selection and other stuff.
I never said GIF was all that great. Hell, beyond the fact that it was piss poor compression, it didn't even have audio. 🤦♂️
Now MPEG1/2, MP3 and JPEG weren't all that bad, considering the era of technology they came from.
I can definitely agree that modern compression has improved beyond that even, but at the same time now everything is automatically tagging in all sorts of extra data like, I dunno, the GPS location the image/video was taken. Like hey, let's just broadcast everyone's address to the rest of the world...
You can put metadata into jpg and mp3 as well, no differences there.
Of course, yes, you can. But back then, that was usually up to the person recording the media to manually add metadata later in processing.
These days everything is getting tagged automatically as you're recording stuff.
Bye bye privacy.
And if you tell someone that it's creepy and they should disable it, they look at you like you're the weird one.
Indeed.
We live in a society. 🤷♂️