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Comment by spb | Hacker News Reader

Don't we already have WebP?

Yes but webp hasn't taken off as much as some would like as a defacto standard.

BPG looks good upon cursory inspection. It seems to be more efficient than WebP and supports 42-bit color. It also has .png's features of transparency and lossless compression although I didn't see anything mentioned about animation to replace .gif.

Bonus: since it's based on h.265 hardware support will come naturally and should be just a software update for devices that already have HEVC capability.

Not to mention it has a JavaScript port that means it can work it browsers today.

Doesn't a JavaScript implementation offset most of the performance benefits? Today we have browsers that are smart about when to cache the decoded image and when not, etc; does that have to be reimplemented in javascript?

I have tried a dart webp decoder. it was so slow. decoding a small image (400*300) takes 300msecs.

There is also a Javascript port of WebP decoding: http://webpjs.appspot.com/

As a bonus, you won't have to pay for a HEVC decoder license.

Not having animation is a plus to me.

h.265 is the corresponding format for animation.

I think webp supports transparency and lossless.

I feel like if you're going to base an image format off a compression standard made for video, that animation is probably a short way off.

From the article: "Mozilla did a study of various lossy compressed image formats. HEVC (hence BPG) was a clear winner by a wide margin. BPG files are actually a little smaller than raw HEVC files because the BPG header is smaller than the corresponding HEVC header." This study includes WebP.

But he conveniently excluded webp from his comparison shots :)

WebP is in some ways superior, in particular because it has a lossless option like PNG. [Edit: NOPE, I was mistaken.] I think it's kind of a shame that it hasn't caught on all that well. Maybe it's a fantasy, but I'd sure like to consolidate all web images into a single widely-supported and open source format. Ah, to dream...

Sixth bullet: Lossless compression is supported.

Missed it, my bad!

I didn't check the code though. I wonder if it's any good. JPEG also has a lossless mode, but no-one uses or even implements it.

From what the website says, BGP does support lossless compression.

I think it's nice to have separate formats for lossy and lossless compression. Makes it easy for users to tell what's going on.

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