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When comparing against JPEG, it's always worth pointing out that most JPEG compressed images aren't optimal and you can reduce their size further with no qualit

When comparing against JPEG, it's always worth pointing out that most JPEG compressed images aren't optimal and you can reduce their size further with no quality loss - http://www.kokkonen.net/tjko/projects.html http://www.kokkonen.net/tjko/projects.html jpegoptim will improve the compression in almost all cases. This highlights a big problem with work on better image compression - we can already do better, but no-one bothers. If you're trying to introduce a whole new codec, you've got a big hurdle to jump.

gillianseed 13y ago
>If you're trying to introduce a whole new codec, you've got a big hurdle to jump. Agreed, I think the big hurdle is simply that jpeg is 'good enough' for web use, and that a transition to a new standard lossy image format just isn't 'worth the hassle' so to speak. As for webp, I personally use it for lossless encoding instead of PNG on personal files these days, but I don't really use it for lossy as I don't think it makes a big enough difference versus jpg and jpg is supported everywhere. That said the current webp implementation is based upon VP8, so I suppose the next implementation will be based upon VP9 which would likely make it competitive with the HEVC based image codec, and unlike the HEVC based one it isn't patent/royalty encumbered.
- ZeroGravitas 13y ago
  The WebP team said they wouldn't revise to match VP9. The improvements mostly didn't apply to still images so it wasn't worth it.
  - brigade 13y ago
    Bigger transforms and more intra modes certainly apply to still images. JPEG's 8x8 transform is pretty small given how large images are nowadays, and VP8 only has a 4x4 transform.
    - ZeroGravitas 13y ago
      Yes, they mentioned that as one clear win: https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/d/topic/webp-discuss/qmASWczhS0c/discussion https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/d/topic/webp-dis...
mistercow 13y ago
Another potential problem is that JPEG encoding and decoding is very mature. I remember this being an issue for color spaces JPEG 2000 in earlier versions of OS X (no idea about more recent versions). No matter what you did as a developer, it never seemed to be possible to get colors to look the same way once they'd been passed through the system-provided JPEG 2000 encoder. If you get all modern browsers to agree to support a new codec, but they all render them slightly differently, nobody is going to use it.

gillianseed 13y ago

>If you're trying to introduce a whole new codec, you've got a big hurdle to jump. Agreed, I think the big hurdle is simply that jpeg is 'good enough' for web use, and that a transition to a new standard lossy image format just isn't 'worth the hassle' so to speak. As for webp, I personally use it for lossless encoding instead of PNG on personal files these days, but I don't really use it for lossy as I don't think it makes a big enough difference versus jpg and jpg is supported everywhere. That said the current webp implementation is based upon VP8, so I suppose the next implementation will be based upon VP9 which would likely make it competitive with the HEVC based image codec, and unlike the HEVC based one it isn't patent/royalty encumbered.

ZeroGravitas 13y ago
The WebP team said they wouldn't revise to match VP9. The improvements mostly didn't apply to still images so it wasn't worth it.
- brigade 13y ago
  Bigger transforms and more intra modes certainly apply to still images. JPEG's 8x8 transform is pretty small given how large images are nowadays, and VP8 only has a 4x4 transform.
  - ZeroGravitas 13y ago
    Yes, they mentioned that as one clear win: https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/d/topic/webp-discuss/qmASWczhS0c/discussion https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/d/topic/webp-dis...

mistercow 13y ago

Another potential problem is that JPEG encoding and decoding is very mature. I remember this being an issue for color spaces JPEG 2000 in earlier versions of OS X (no idea about more recent versions). No matter what you did as a developer, it never seemed to be possible to get colors to look the same way once they'd been passed through the system-provided JPEG 2000 encoder. If you get all modern browsers to agree to support a new codec, but they all render them slightly differently, nobody is going to use it.