Google Wants to Kill JPEGs With New WebP Format [Google]

These pictures look an analogous-but they’re not. Because the sign up the proper, hypothetically, takes up nearly 40% less space. That’s the version in WebP, Google’s plan to speed up the net by slimming down its images.

What is WebP? It’s a new graphics format that Google hopes will make file transfers faster than currently possible with the relatively bulky JPEG standard. WebP, like JPEG, is a technique of ” lossy compression,” meaning that it doesn’t perfectly reproduce images, but provides you with a call between file size and movie quality. THere are important differences between the two, though, in keeping with Google :

To improve on the compression that JPEG provides, we used an image compressor based on the VP8 codec that Google open-sourced in May 2010. We applied the techniques from VP8 video intra frame coding to push the envelope in still image coding. We also adapted an extremely lightweight container based on RIFF. While this container format contributes a minimal overhead of only 20 bytes per image, it really is extensible to allow authors to save lots of meta-data they might wish to store.

According to Google, images make up about 65% of bytes transmitted across the internet today. Any option to reduce that might be hugely valuable for alleviating Google’s tremendous network burden. That’s a large ” would,” though-JPEG is deeply entrenched on the internet, and WebP files take about eight times longer to encode. There’s also no browser support yet-that is why our example above is hypothetical.

Of course, native support for Chrome is all but inevitable, which implies its presence on other WebKit browsers-like Safari-is equally assured. It’s no easy thing, launching a new file format, but if anyone’s got the dimensions and the determination to succeed, it’s Google. [ Chromium Blog , CNET ]

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This post is tagged: browser support, file format, graphics format, Hypothetically, image compressor, internet today, new graphics