I don’t know what a .webp file is but I don’t like it. They’re like a filthy prank version of the image/gif you’re looking for. They make you jump through all these hoops to find the original versions of the files that you can actually do anything with.
Edit: honestly I assumed it had something to do with Google protecting themselves from image piracy shit
You only dislike it because whatever bad app you’re using to share them on doesn’t support them.
Stop being the gullible fool and start hating the apps not the file format.
Edit: I also spot your .gif favouritism in there. .gif is an archaic and wasteful format, and asking for it is the same as looking at your car and whining that the fuel has no lead.
Why’s man so vexed about file formats? Chill
The fact that GIF is still a thing in 2023 is baffling
The terminology is sticking around longer than the format, too! Love me some (webm/H265) gifs.
The fact that GIF is still a thing in 2023 is baffling
As opposed to what widely supported animated image format?
APNG, WebP, AVIF, WebM. Not sure about JpegXL
GIF is size and ressource heavy
Of all the formats you mentioned these are supported on popular platforms:
- Twitter: gif
- Discord: gif
- Mastodon: gif
- Reddit: gif, apng
- Tumblr: gif, webp
- Lemmy: gif, apng, webp
That’s why gifs are still a thing.
This is circular reasoning. They are wondering why gif is still a thing precisely because it’s so supported while other formats that are better aren’t and you are answering that it is because it’s supported while other formats aren’t.
Because it’s old and easy to handle. Yes it’s wasteful if you convert whole videos, but really anything under 10s with low rez is easily handleable by pretty much anything. Gif was the first animated format and that’s why it’s big. Also early internet forum days were absolutely plastered with pixelart gifs that ran for minutes and barely swalloed 100kb. You can get a lot of bang for your buck if you save on pixels and framerate. But ofc a 60fps render of some 4k bluray clip will eat your memory. Contrast that with 16×32 px gif that runs at 8fps.
It’s pronounced GIF
Is that GIF as in GIF, or GIF as in GIF?
mp4? Imgur doesn’t even bother hosting gifs—it automatically converts any you upload to mp4 because gifs are incredibly storage-inefficient.
mp4 is a video format, the key differences with animated images being autoplay, looping and maybe transparency.
The point is the browser just plays the mp4 with autoplay and looping and then people call them GIFs when they aren’t. The only time you are looking at an actual GIF file is when the quality is atrocious and the colors are messed up because it needed to be dithered.
The format actually has a lot of benefits - it supports transparency, animation, and compresses very efficiently. So it could theoretically replace GIF, JPG, and PNG in one fell swoop.
The downsides are that many apps don’t currently support it and that it’s owned by Google.
Personally I use webp for images that are not intended to share (e.g. banners and images on my blog), but stick to JPG/PNG for sending to other people.
and that it’s owned by Google.
I mean yes, but it’s
patentirrevocably royalty free (so long as you don’t sue people claiming WebM/P as your own/partially your own work), so it’s effectively owned by the public.Google hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer implementations of the WebM Specifications, where such license applies only to those patent claims, both currently owned by Google and acquired in the future, licensable by Google that are necessarily infringed by implementation of the WebM Specifications. If You or your agent or exclusive licensee institute or order or agree to the institution of patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any implementation of the WebM Specifications constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, or inducement of patent infringement, then any rights granted to You under the License for the WebM Specifications shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed. “WebM Specifications” means the specifications to the WebM codecs as embodied in the source code to the WebM codecs or any written description of such specifications, in either case as distributed by Google.
Source: https://www.webmproject.org/license/bitstream/
(But Dark, that’s WebM not WebP! – they share the same license: https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/g/webp-discuss/c/W4_j7Tlofv8)
And here comes jpegXL claiming the same things. Fun times.
Okay, but jpeg xl is looking pretty good. Especially the ability to losslessly convert jpg to jxl.
I didn’t know this either.
“Google launched the WebP format as part of its mission to make loading times faster across the internet. WebP allows websites to display high-quality images — but with much smaller file sizes than traditional formats such as PNG and JPEG.”
It’s a image format with extremely good compression that’s tiny doesn’t look bad. As someone who had shitty internet for years I definitely welcome them but as usual with Googles inventions they push it on to everyone and let other browsers catch up.
You would like it if you had slow internet, or you hosted a website.
My website turned 5MB images into 100KB images using webp. My website now loads instantly, saves you bandwidth, and me costs!
Wait really? Are they that much more efficient?
Yep! Not least of all, GIF & JPEG are over 30 year old formats and WebP is about a decade old. So there’s at least 20 years of advancement there
JPEG-XL has been out for three years, and is better and more efficient than any other image format on the market. Google just has been insisting on keeping them off the web because they want to push WebP instead.
It’ll be interesting to see which wins out, .jxl or .webp
Place your bets folks!
I’d bet on WEBP simply because it was first out of the gate. Even though JXL is likely a better overall solution, it might arrive too late to dethrone WEBP. I’m already seeing WEBP in lots of places.
It’s just a new picture format that is arguably better than jpeg in many scenarios. It has been around for many years. Windows just refuses to do file associations correctly, so people hate it for no reason.
Here is an example of a non crap webp:
For anyone who doesn’t know, you can easily change the file extension to .jpg and it’ll still work.
But also know that it’s not a jpeg, and it only works because whatever app is opening the jpeg is able to read the webp format.
Webp is an image format.
Jpg is ancient, and gif, holy shit gif is from stone age.
I dunno, if you’re playing a video, you probably want x264 or better these days, no? For music, we use some variant of mp4 or lossless at this point.
Yet with pictures, for some reason we insist on the old shitty stuff.
Using jpeg or gif is like using mp1 for music and VideoCD for video. Come on now.
The only problem with webp is that there’s quality loss if you convert an already compressed jpeg into webp with high compression rate, like some web sites do. That can suck, but I don’t know how else to get people to use more modern formats. Otherwise we’d be using ancient formats into the 24th century.
Jpg is ancient
Sure, but so is .zip, and that’s still useful.
IMO a better argument would be how and why webp improves on jpg (better compression, etc), not just “it’s newer”.
I shouldn’t need to say this, but here goes: “old” and “shitty” aren’t actually synonyms.
The old shitty stuff was designed to compress images and stuff to be small enough to transfer on potato internet.
Now the HTML size itself ends up larger than many of the images while they code in endless advertising and scripts.
Old internet was better TBH.
This isn’t really relevant when webp is more optimised and smaller file size. People are determined to force things to be GIFs despite them looking terrible and taking up 50MB for 10 seconds of 720p looping video.
Oh, I forgot to mention in my other comment, as far as compression goes, what ever happened to good old MIDI? 🤔
Midi is quite literally a text format, and you can open it in anything. It’s just a matter of interpretation what comes out of it.
WebP is awesome (JPEG-XL is awesomer though). It compresses better than JPEG which was introduced 30(!) years ago. It’s time for JPEG to go away.
Why do so few apps (besides browsers) seem to support it? E.g. Win10 photo viewer and seemingly all my messaging apps
The format itself sounds good, and I see it everywhere online, but is there some reason it’s unsupported?
Works great in Ubuntu.
My guess is Microsoft doesn’t like it because Google came up with it. Ms has had some issues with recognizing open formats before. Could be you are using old versions of apps too.
Photoshop couldn’t open it which is absolutely hilarious for an expensive app… while Paint.net can.
.webp was developed Google so of course Microsoft hates it and tried to hinder it’s adoption.
