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Comment by tomalaci | Hacker News Reader

I usually have a script/alias cmd to automatically convert images to webp. The webp format has pretty much replaced jpg/jpeg (lacks transparency/alpha support) and png (no compression) formats for me.

There is also AVIF format which is newer and better but it needs to still mature a bit with better support/compatability.

If you are hosting images it is nice to use avif and fallback to webp.

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I know it’s more efficient, but It’s too bad webp is basically supported in browsers and nowhere else. I don’t think any OS even makes a thumbnail for the icon! Forget opening it in an image editor, etc. And any site that wants you to upload something (e.g. an avatar) won’t accept it. So, webp seems in practice to be like a lossy compression layer that makes images into ephemeral content that can’t be reused.

(Yes, I know, I should just make a folder action on Downloads that converts them with some CLI tool, but it makes me sad that this only further degrades their quality.)

The only OS that doesnt as far as I'm aware is windows. And what image editors still have problems? Affinity has supported it for several years, GIMP, lightroom/PS, photopea, everywhere I test webp works fine. All work just fine.

Most social media sites take webp these days no issue, its mostly older oft php-based sites that struggle far as im aware. And when it cuts down bandwidth by a sizeable amount theres network effects that tend to push some level of adoption of more modern image formats.

> png (no compression)

To be clear, PNG only supports lossless compression, while WebP has separate lossy and lossless modes. AVIF can do lossless compression too, but you're usually better off using WebP or PNG (if you need >8 bpc) instead as it really isn't good at that.

There is lossy PNG compression that works very well for images using a limited color palette (pngquant, lossypng, etc).

PNG can be lossy before the lossless step. You can take areas of near-matching pixel values and make them actually match, to work better with PNG's near neighbor compression. There are a few encoders that can do that.

With how inaccessible webp is I’m surprised it doesn’t come with some DRM.

I’m sure Google has stats about “right click save as”

It is not that trivial, because there are tons of existing JPEG files and lossy recompression costs quality. (PNG does get replaced primarily because lossless WebP is kinda a superset of what PNG internally does.)

Just re-encode it to Jpeg XL without loss of quality, and use less space.

This is probably the neatest feature of JPEG XL. Although, creating a thumbnail by literally truncating the image bytestream is a close second in 'neat' factor.

On your last point: I find it super annoying when both lossy and lossless codecs have the same name, and, more importantly, file extension. I get it that internally they are "almost the same thing", just with one extra step of discarding low-impact values, but when I see a PNG/FLAC file I know, that if the file was handled properly and wasn't produced by Windows clipboard or something, it is supposed to represent exactly the original data. When I see JPEG/MP3, I know that whatever it went through, it is not the original data for sure. When I see WEBP, I assume it's lossy, because it's just how it's used, and I cannot just convert all my PNG files to a newer format, because after that I won't be able to tell (easily) which is the original and which is not.

Ah, in that case you would be more annoyed to learn that lossy WebP and lossless WebP are completely distinct. They only share the container format and their type codes are different.

Awesome. It would be interesting to learn why they even thought it is a good idea. Content-agnostic containers may make sense for video, but for the vast majority of use-cases a "video" is in fact a complex bundle of (several) video, audio, metadata tracks, so the "container" does much heavier lifting than specifying codec details and some metadata.

Why would they want different container formats? No point in having multiple different metadata specs.

The PNG and FLAC format doesn't doesn't tell you that. While both specify lossless encoring algorithms (assuming data is already quantized to a supported bit depth), that doesn't prevent encoders from adding additional lossy preprocessing steps that improve compression - and there are several such encoders for PNG.

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