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BrendanEich

WebP does not offer immediate benefits by our measurement:

http://people.mozilla.org/~josh/lossy_compressed_image_study...

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform...

If you work at Google, please point out errors in our methods or data, give us better metrics, or otherwise correct us.

> This Cisco blog, what if...

"What if?" What if Google fails to get VP9 codecs into h/w? (See my response above; half-way [decoder only] does not count.)

Lots of what-ifs here, but I believe OpenH264 is Cisco's best s/w codec. Let's see, shall we, and not speculate idly.

/be

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That's for JPEG, I had a long discussion on HN with someone, apparently from Mozilla, over what I meant by this. My social network streams are more and more filled up with multi-megabyte animated GIFs, and WebP is a reasonable replacement for both animated GIFs and transparent PNGs. Today, we have three formats to serve three needs: lossy, you choose jpeg, transparency, you choose PNG, animated, you choose gif. Animated and transparent? Out of luck. Lossy animated? Out of luck. Lossy and transparent? Out of luck.

I don't care so much about replacing JPEG as replacing GIF and PNG. APNG might fit the bill for animated, but given how much information GIF throws away, and given the 2M-5M GIFs I see out there already, it's likely to exacerbate the bandwidth problem, not make it better.

I don't really care if WebP is the replacement, maybe the replacement of mjpeg, or some other format so that people post short 5-6 second clips using <video> instead of <img>. But animated GIFs are chewing up a lot of mobile bandwidth and there is no solution out there right now that mitigates the problem.

> My social network streams are more and more filled up with multi-megabyte animated GIFs, and WebP is a reasonable replacement for both animated GIFs and transparent PNGs.

It's only slightly better than lossy PNG:

http://pngmini.com/vs-webp/

It doesn't appear to be good at beating GIF, and loses to APNG in compression (and I suspect also decoding speed):

http://littlesvr.ca/apng/gif_apng_webp1.html

and I find it highly questionable whether a new format that is exactly as expensive as WebM intra frames should be used instead of WebM.

> Lossy and transparent? Out of luck.

Well, you could lossy-optimize PNGs if you really want to. Take Google front page logo, for example: not a lot of colors to justify using 32 bpp PNG. Just sacrifice some alpha bits, and you can switch to 256-color indexed PNG. I bet nobody would notice the difference, and the result would be a lot smaller.

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