7 ms·

WebP also supports animation, which is important because GIFs are notoriously large.

sprokolopolis 6y ago
Also, gif only supports one-bit transparency; Whereas webp and png allow partial/gradated transparency.
arcticbull 6y ago
Animations should just be videos. No reason for an animated image format, an animated image is just a video with no audio track.
- auxym 6y ago
  My understanding is that webp is video. That is, it's a still frame using the vp8 codec.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    As far as I can tell though, it has to be VP8 and can't be VP9. Maybe I'm mistaken about that, but all the webp literature I've read or skimmed talks about VP8 specifically. So what's the advantage of an animated webp using VP8 over a webm using VP9?
  - TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
    It only has VP8's intraframe compression, not VP8's interframe compression, so animated WebP is not a proper video codec and is a different beast to WebM video.
- dtech 6y ago
  An animated WebP is basically a WebM video. Or let me rephrase, why is WebP as a animated picture / video format insufficient?
  - sk65535 6y ago
    video format usually take up too much memory: what you gain in efficiency costs in resources. Conversely, animated WebP are dirt cheap: one buffer only, written over and over. Then, there's optim being made in WebP to allow fast jump to keyframe, even when there's transparency. Video codec don't allow that, and you can have an arbitrary long torture sequence of transparent frame that needs to be decoded back when the video comes in the view again. Last, animation are usually low-fps (~10fps): there, video codec don't perform very well and are basically keyframes. So the difference isn't as great as one would think. Oh, and hardware need a 'reset' between decoding tasks, to reconfigure memory, and decoding can't be parallelized.
- bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
  Eh. An animated image (an image that contains some sort of video media, whether gif or h264 or whatever) is a hint to the browser to play it automatically and without sound. If everything were true video (say, mp4) you couldn’t make that distinction. As long as the video in the animated video is encoded properly — as real video and not a sequence of frames as gif does — then animated images definitely have their places.
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    > An animated image (an image that contains some sort of video media, whether gif or h264 or whatever) is a hint to the browser to play it automatically and without sound. If everything were true video (say, mp4) you couldn’t make that distinction. <video autoplay muted> says the same thing.
- coopsmgoops 6y ago
  The only advantage I can see it where videos are not allowed to autoplay you would want a gif to play somethig small.
  - spartanatreyu 6y ago
    Videos can autoplay on browsers if they are muted
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    For me is all about sharing. The website itself usually displays the "video" as if it was a gif, but as soon as you go to share anywhere, you're sharing a video on platforms that handle it like a video. No looping, seek controls, complicated UI, etc. I just want to post a photo that auto plays and loops anywhere. I don't are about the internals, but I want all applications to recognize that file as an animated photo, not a video.
- thinkloop 6y ago
  No need for image formats either as an image is just a very short single frame video.
  - basilgohar 6y ago
    I think this a very poor comparison to make because it denies the time dimension of video completely, which fundamentally affects how we perceive and use video, and also ignores the fact that still images linger and have different requirements.
Andrex 6y ago
As a point of data, Animated PNG is finally (as of ~2019) supported natively among all major browsers. https://caniuse.com/#search=animated%20png https://caniuse.com/#search=animated%20png Edit- I was unaware the recently-announced Safari 14 Technical Preview adds support for WebP too! Making both formats viable for all browsers, finally.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  Ooh, does that mean that slack supports WebP now? Update: nope. Maybe another year :(
- _AzMoo 6y ago
  Recently we've been going through the browser stats on our websites, and while globally apparently IE is dying, it's certainly not dead yet. In the specific industry I work in (Heavy Automotive Retailing, eg Truck Sales and Servicing), we see upwards of 30% of our users on browsers <= IE11. All of our sites are getting poor lighthouse scores on performance with the main suggestion to be changing to webp, but that would exclude 30% of our customers.
  - amq 6y ago
    There is a way to offer both jpg and webp, letting the browser to choose.
pornel 6y ago
WebM (despite being closely related to WebP) can be 5-10x more efficient than WebP. That's because WebP focused so strongly on being a GIF equivalent that it also dropped all things that made WebM efficient and instead adopted GIF's awfully inefficient architecture (just dumb frames overlaid on top of each other, without motion vectors or predicted frames). Safari shows how it can be done: it supports silent MP4/H.264 straight in <img>. You get all the ease of use GIF, order of magnitude smaller file, and hardware acceleration. It's unintuitive, but well-compressed videos are cheaper to decode than dumb "animation" formats, because file size differences are so massive that it's cheaper to decompress a small amount of complex data than to chew through vast amounts of poorly compressed data.
- catalogia 6y ago
  There's also the practical matter of network speed. In many common scenarios a 300kb webm can be fully downloaded and playing while a roughly equivalent 5mb gif is paused a few frames in, buffering.
- fomine3 6y ago
  Also video decoding is cheaper because most GPU/SoCs supports hardware decoding.
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    This isn't a good assumption to make, many people own cheap phones that lack hardware codecs that can decode videos with modern encodings.
    - fomine3 6y ago
      I can't imagine any cheap SoC for smartphones without H.264 HW decoder because playing video is essential and it can record video. Possibly exists for low-feature phones without camera but it's not for web browsing.
      - heavyset_go 6y ago

Also, gif only supports one-bit transparency; Whereas webp and png allow partial/gradated transparency.

Animations should just be videos. No reason for an animated image format, an animated image is just a video with no audio track.

auxym 6y ago
My understanding is that webp is video. That is, it's a still frame using the vp8 codec.
- catalogia 6y ago
  As far as I can tell though, it has to be VP8 and can't be VP9. Maybe I'm mistaken about that, but all the webp literature I've read or skimmed talks about VP8 specifically. So what's the advantage of an animated webp using VP8 over a webm using VP9?
- TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
  It only has VP8's intraframe compression, not VP8's interframe compression, so animated WebP is not a proper video codec and is a different beast to WebM video.
dtech 6y ago
An animated WebP is basically a WebM video. Or let me rephrase, why is WebP as a animated picture / video format insufficient?
- sk65535 6y ago
  video format usually take up too much memory: what you gain in efficiency costs in resources. Conversely, animated WebP are dirt cheap: one buffer only, written over and over. Then, there's optim being made in WebP to allow fast jump to keyframe, even when there's transparency. Video codec don't allow that, and you can have an arbitrary long torture sequence of transparent frame that needs to be decoded back when the video comes in the view again. Last, animation are usually low-fps (~10fps): there, video codec don't perform very well and are basically keyframes. So the difference isn't as great as one would think. Oh, and hardware need a 'reset' between decoding tasks, to reconfigure memory, and decoding can't be parallelized.
bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
Eh. An animated image (an image that contains some sort of video media, whether gif or h264 or whatever) is a hint to the browser to play it automatically and without sound. If everything were true video (say, mp4) you couldn’t make that distinction. As long as the video in the animated video is encoded properly — as real video and not a sequence of frames as gif does — then animated images definitely have their places.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  > An animated image (an image that contains some sort of video media, whether gif or h264 or whatever) is a hint to the browser to play it automatically and without sound. If everything were true video (say, mp4) you couldn’t make that distinction. <video autoplay muted> says the same thing.
coopsmgoops 6y ago
The only advantage I can see it where videos are not allowed to autoplay you would want a gif to play somethig small.
- spartanatreyu 6y ago
  Videos can autoplay on browsers if they are muted
- ehsankia 6y ago
  For me is all about sharing. The website itself usually displays the "video" as if it was a gif, but as soon as you go to share anywhere, you're sharing a video on platforms that handle it like a video. No looping, seek controls, complicated UI, etc. I just want to post a photo that auto plays and loops anywhere. I don't are about the internals, but I want all applications to recognize that file as an animated photo, not a video.
thinkloop 6y ago
No need for image formats either as an image is just a very short single frame video.
- basilgohar 6y ago
  I think this a very poor comparison to make because it denies the time dimension of video completely, which fundamentally affects how we perceive and use video, and also ignores the fact that still images linger and have different requirements.

Andrex 6y ago

As a point of data, Animated PNG is finally (as of ~2019) supported natively among all major browsers. https://caniuse.com/#search=animated%20png https://caniuse.com/#search=animated%20png Edit- I was unaware the recently-announced Safari 14 Technical Preview adds support for WebP too! Making both formats viable for all browsers, finally.

jjoonathan 6y ago
Ooh, does that mean that slack supports WebP now? Update: nope. Maybe another year :(
_AzMoo 6y ago
Recently we've been going through the browser stats on our websites, and while globally apparently IE is dying, it's certainly not dead yet. In the specific industry I work in (Heavy Automotive Retailing, eg Truck Sales and Servicing), we see upwards of 30% of our users on browsers <= IE11. All of our sites are getting poor lighthouse scores on performance with the main suggestion to be changing to webp, but that would exclude 30% of our customers.
- amq 6y ago
  There is a way to offer both jpg and webp, letting the browser to choose.

pornel 6y ago

WebM (despite being closely related to WebP) can be 5-10x more efficient than WebP. That's because WebP focused so strongly on being a GIF equivalent that it also dropped all things that made WebM efficient and instead adopted GIF's awfully inefficient architecture (just dumb frames overlaid on top of each other, without motion vectors or predicted frames). Safari shows how it can be done: it supports silent MP4/H.264 straight in <img>. You get all the ease of use GIF, order of magnitude smaller file, and hardware acceleration. It's unintuitive, but well-compressed videos are cheaper to decode than dumb "animation" formats, because file size differences are so massive that it's cheaper to decompress a small amount of complex data than to chew through vast amounts of poorly compressed data.

catalogia 6y ago
There's also the practical matter of network speed. In many common scenarios a 300kb webm can be fully downloaded and playing while a roughly equivalent 5mb gif is paused a few frames in, buffering.
fomine3 6y ago
Also video decoding is cheaper because most GPU/SoCs supports hardware decoding.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  This isn't a good assumption to make, many people own cheap phones that lack hardware codecs that can decode videos with modern encodings.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    I can't imagine any cheap SoC for smartphones without H.264 HW decoder because playing video is essential and it can record video. Possibly exists for low-feature phones without camera but it's not for web browsing.
    - heavyset_go 6y ago