Google slips open source JPEG killer into Gmail, Picasa
Gets WebP happy
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Google has announced that Gmail and Picasa as well as its Chrome browser are now using WebP, the image compression format it open sourced last fall in an effort to replace the aging JPEG standard.
With a Friday blog post, the company also said that it has made several improvements to the technology since it was first unveiled.
When Google open sourced WebP last September, it claimed the new image format would reduce the size of web images by a good 40 per cent. The format is based on VP8, the video codec Google acquired with its purchase of On2 Technologies early last year and promptly open sourced as part of the new media format known as WebM.
Like JPEG, WebP uses "lossy" compression, discarding small pieces of an image as it works to make the file smaller. Google has essentially taken the techniques used with VP8 video intra-frame coding and applied them to image coding. WebP uses predictive coding, predicting the values in a block of pixels using the values in neighboring blocks and encoding only the difference between the actual value and the prediction. This difference is known as the residual, which typically contains many zeros that can be compressed more effectively.
Since the release the format, Google has added a fancy unsampler – designed to reduce pixelation around image edges – and WebP data can now be decoded as it is being downloaded from the web. This means portions of an image can be displayed before the entire file has been downloaded.
The company has also improved compression by working to divide images into sections that exhibit "similar compressibility". "For each of these segments, we tune the amount of compression and filtering differently, and bits are redistributed where they are most useful," Google said.
WebP is supported not only by Google Chrome but also Opera's desktop browser. Separately, Opera is using the format to improve Opera Turbo, its service for compressing entire webpages for mobile phones and other machines burdened by low-bandwidth net connections. You can also share WebP images via Gmail and Google's dedicated photo sharing app, Picasa, and the company will soon bring WebP support to App Engine, its so-called development cloud for building and hosting applications on its famously distributed infrastructure.
Google also points to several tools that let you manipulate WebP on your own, including Pixelmator, ImageMagick, the WebP plugin for Photoshop, and the Java VP8 decoder. You can also download the WebP codec onto Windows machines to add support for Microsoft Office and Windows Media, and you can also find support for Mac OS X, Debian, OpenSUSE, Gentoo, and the Apache HTTP Server.
Mozilla, Apple, and Microsoft have yet to adopt the format in their browsers. ®
COMMENTS
Re: What's the use?
Look at the 40% saving from Google's perspective. They serve an awful lot of images, 40% of an awful lot is quite a considerable amount (the scale runs from "bugger all" to "a fuck-ton").
Compare them.
No, really. Save a file in WebM at the highest quality, then try saving the same file as a JPG, matching the file size. The JPEG will be much, much worse. Set JPEG to the same quality, and it'll come out a whopping 66% bigger (yes, that's how percentages work to those who see 66% and are confused by the fact that it's not 40% =)
Essentially, WebM isn't just "different", it really is unequivocally "better".
Grab yourself a copy of of the WebM Photoshop format filter, and a copy of filtermeister - open any random "real" image (let's saw a raw photograph of good old' nature, or a crisp illustrator-exported vector graphic), save it to highest quality JPEG, close the file, reopen the original, save it to highest quality WebM, close the file, and then open all three.
Create two new images, copy the origina image's layer to both, and then copy the jpg layer to one, and the webm layer to the other. Invert the colors on both layers, and set their opacity to 50%. We now have a difference result. Flatten Both images, job's a good'n.
So that's the first thing we really care about: can you see any artifacting? I've had to run this test many times, My puny human eyes can't. Not without first zooming in a lot, anyway. But let's assume that this isn't enough to convince you, because what should be {127,127,127} could be {126,128,129}, right? Maybe you care about that difference. You shouldn't, but maybe you do, so let's see how strong the difference really is.
Fire up fiter meister and write a small color ramper - For all three channels (R,B,G, neither WebM nor JPEG officially support A), set up a color ramper so that if the color is off from the 127 mark, it gets stronly boosted, say fifteen fold, with a cap at 0 and 255. Now you can see the difference in how JPEG and WebM do their magic - WebM actually uses much nicer spells, with less intense differences between the original and the lossy encoded image.
This really is a fantastic image format, and long overdue. The only tarnish on its reputation is that the world hates "new" formats. Thankfully, the company that wants to push it also happens to make one of the more popular browsers. And you can be sure that the code for enabling WebM in Chrome finds its way into webkit, followed by the Mac supporting WebM. Photoshop already supports it with the download of a single file, and suddenly its future looks nice and bright - Superior image format alternative for JPG that makes super tiny files? About bloody time.
Mine's the one with the WebM filter on a USB stick attached to my key ring.
Open Source?
Anyone notice a rather surprising omission from the list of programs to have, or soon have, support for WebP? GIMP - which is open source!
It seems it's largely closed source and corporate entities that have made the moves so far.
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