Google Wants to Speed Up the Web by Killing the JPEG | Hacker News Reader

Google Wants to Speed Up the Web by Killing the JPEG

petapixel.com

14 pointscoffee8 comments

I'm sure this was discussed before when this story made the rounds last month, but this continues to make little sense to me:

http://code.google.com/speed/webp/gallery.html

WebP might be great, but how can it be a meaningful comparison --

1) take already compressed jpegs from wikipedia and re-compress them using WebP, and then tout the 39% file compression achieved? I can re-compress Jpeg with more Jpeg and also get 39% "more" compression.

2) as with all lossy compression, unless there is some measure of the loss, perceptual or otherwise, what are we really comparing?

If you cut it down, and it's perceptually the same, then it's an obvious win no?

1) How do we know it's perceptually the same?

2) How do we know we couldn't get the same perceptual gains from more JPEG compression?

Did you see their comparison of WebP vs. JPEG at constant quality? http://code.google.com/speed/webp/docs/c_study.html

(Not only is this thread a dupe, but every single comment as well. Nice.)

I assumed that Google planned to use it in exactly the way they tested e.g.

* thumbnails of jpegs on picasa web galleries

* thumbnails of jpegs & pngs on Google image search

* thumbnails of videos on Youtube

* an Opera Turbo/Mini style proxy server that recompresses jpegs and pngs

* a turnkey web-accelerator that recompresses all the images on your site and serves the WebP ones to compatible browsers without you needing to do anything

However, I don't think anything like this has actually been announced. Without such announcements the methodology does seem strange.

A very good article about vp8 vs x264 vs jpeg: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/541

The comments are also worth reading.

These news are like a month old. What is this, Slashdot?

Yea, guess enough people did not see it.

This might be interesting http://github.com/antimatter15/weppy using JS and canvas to display the file format.

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