The technology that managed to accomplish what NFTs couldn’t.
Is it still a meme when you feel it in your soul?
I don’t know why, maybe because it’s Sunday morning and I’m just drinking my coffee and browsing around while the rest of the house sleeps in, but this triggered a rabbit hole for me. I already have a lil plugin just for quickly saving direct to PNG or JPG when I right click a WebP in my browsers, but I SHOULDN’T GODDAMN HAVE TO.
WEBP as a wrapper (as coupled along with AVIF/AV1/VP8/etc) seems all about reassertion of corporate control of web file formats by pivoting codecs back toward patent encumbrance as a control factor, just without universal royalty hooks attached to anyone that touches even free and open software utilizing it. We were actually FREE of that bullshit for a short time. PNG has no patent encumbrance. GIF, MP3, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2 all have expired patents and can be used freely.
[Don’t get me wrong, MPEG as an org was and is pure corruption and greed, and MPEG-4 Part 2 adoption was fully diminished outside of ‘free’ circles based on their stated intention to apply a ‘content fee’ to the royalty requirements. It’s obvious why VP8 -> AV1 had to happen one way or another to break their royalty cabal insanity, but it still doesn’t taste good at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_Part_2 ]
The consortium of companies behind WebP and AV1 are all taking part in the enshittification of the entire technology sector, from web sites and web apps, operating systems, and application ecosystems. Why would we ever trust them to not rug pull the ‘irrevocable but revocable’ patent license scheme? They only put it together in the first place to end run having to pay someone who was ‘not them’ any royalties for image/video/audio encoding.
References:
WEBP is patent encumbered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP
https://github.com/ImageMagick/webp/blob/main/PATENTS
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, transfer, and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of these implementations of WebM, 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 these implementations of WebM. This grant does not include claims that would be infringed only as a consequence of further modification of these implementations.
GIF is not patent encumbered since 2004.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF
In 2004, all patents relating to the proprietary compression used for GIF expired.
PNG was never patent encumbered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNG
PNG was developed as an improved, non-patented replacement for Graphics Interchange Format (GIF)—unofficially, the initials PNG stood for the recursive acronym “PNG’s not GIF”.
AV1, VP8, VP9, and other modernized “open source” or “free” Video Codecs all appear to be patent encumbered.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23747923
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1
Shit, you’ve got me mad too
This grant does not include claims that would be infringed only as a consequence of further modification of these implementations.
IANAL but what they’re saying here seems to be “if you download our code and modify it and, with that modification, touch some other patent of ours we can still have your ass”. That is, the license they’re giving out only cover the code that they release. Which shouldn’t be too controversial, I think.
The issue with codecs in general is that there’s plenty of trolls around and coming up with any audio or video codec is probably going to hit one of their patents, so the best that FLOSS codecs can do is “we don’t have any patents on this” or “we do have patents on this but license them freely, also, if someone else goes after you we’re going to detonate a patent minefield under their ass”. Patent portfolios have essentially reached the level of MAD.
Personally, IDGAF: Software patents aren’t a thing over here. You only have to worry about that stuff if you’re developing silicon.
AV1, VP8, VP9, and other modernized “open source” or “free” Video Codecs all appear to be patent encumbered.
MPEG LA(patent trolls, not to be confused with ISO MPEG) tried to claim that AV1 uses their patents, but failed.
Snipping tool is for snipping, screenshots are for cropping.
It doesn’t have to be!
“?” in a URL often means “Delete from the ‘?’ until the end to avoid garbage”
Lemmy.ca defaults to: https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/d751342c-5d83-4a5e-9b6b-9817e03db780.jpeg
But if you’re on .world, you can do a little snip and things still work:
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/5441af5c-19cd-4ffb-aad8-94da9ea361a9.jpegRecursivity is always funny.
I do this little trick where I change .webp to .jpg
Just change the extension to PNG
Do people really think this changes the file type?
No I don’t think it does but it works. Specifically I download webp pictures on pc and when I try to send them on WhatsApp it does not recognise them so I change the extension to JPG or PNG and it works it sends them and they can be viewed.
Sounds like the file type verification on WhatsApp is not on mime-type but only on extension. Some receivers might have trouble opening these though.
In my experience, WhatsApp does not send an image unchanged. So it doesn’t matter if the recipient can handle it, as long as WhatsApp’s conversion can
They might use standard imagemagick or such on the backend meaning they can ingest pretty much any image format ever invented, and have a limited set of extensions allowed on the frontend side so people don’t upload
.txts.Well so far I did not encounter any issues so as long as it works I’ll still do it like this
Is this some windows problem I’m too FOSS to understand?
Windows can only display .bmp images apparently. It’s an old problem.
Don’t think so cause if I change the extension to PNG or JPG it works just fine
Not really? Just lucky.
Go back and eddit this comment when you download a webp and nothing can use it.
I have plenty of WEBP and every image editing/viewing application I have installed can use it fine. Including, but not limited to:
pdn, GIMP, Krita, Aseprite, InkScape, OpenToonz, IrfanView
I think Apple users have issues with Webm & Webp? But the issue here is using Apple products in the first place. Losing 90% of basic functionality is what you expect when using one of those.
Maybe then I’m the unlucky one that want to use things that don’t support it.
And I’m not on Apple lol (linux)
Name one program that doesn’t support WebP.
The 1996 free breakfast cereal promotional game Chex Quest (which is actually a total conversion of Ultimate Doom with much of the original data intact).
Adobe Premiere, After Effects, Davinci Resolve
All the memes I send to my friends on messenger basically come from Lemmy. I always have to download the image and use the phone image editor to crop it by one pixel. It then let’s me save it, and it saves as jpg/png by default.
Yeah but memes don’t need high quality?
The point is Messenger doesn’t allow sending WEBPs
Skill issue, the only actual drawback is that some legacy systems whitelisted image extensions and haven’t been updated. Even then just take a screenshot and upload that.
Old meme.
Pretty much everything supports it now, and in case you haven’t noticed pretty much all the images on Lemmy are webp because it lets instances save tons and tons on bandwidth and storage.
The next “better but not yet supported” image format is .avif.
Not avif, but jxl
Okay can someone please explain why Facebook Messenger on my phone keeps saying it can’t support gifs? Yes yes I’m an old man, but on the other hand what the fuck, fucking gifs? Are they devolving faster than Google?
(Also like, the gif feature built into Facebook Messenger itself. The longer I think about this problem, the more I think the app is just throwing the wrong error)Messenger is just crap.
No argument there.
What doesn’t support avif? Even Apple devices support it and they are usually the last to adopt anything. I’ve crushed all my website using it and it turns a 1MB image to 80KB without quality loss, absolutely amazing compression!
In websites it works great, there isn’t a browser around that can’t deal with it. Same how with when webp was new you’d run into it all over the web because there they were just better and worked fine.
It’s everything else that isn’t ready yet. My older android device can’t deal with them in apps, no AV1 decoder maybe? Dunno.
Not many processors have AV1 hardware decoders yet (Apple thru them in on their M3’s last year and latest iPhone 15 Pros) so I can’t see it being that. There’s also software decoding that works fine. My wallpaper on macOS has been avif since last year (Sonoma) and works without issue. I don’t think it works in Windows 10 tho. No issues with the latest Ubuntu and I’m not familiar at all with Android OS.
In any case, I think it’s the best thing to come out in a long time. My website with raw PNGs was about 120MB. I crushed those PNGs with noticeable quality loss down to 50MB. I then crushed the original 120MB down to 60MB with minimal to no visual quality loss using webp. But I got it down to 25MB without loss using avif at 85% compression. Just insane performance, couldn’t be more impressed!
Not the end of the world, but out of the few apps that don’t fit in the ‘pretty much everything’ group, messenger is one of them and I can’t share a good bunch of memes on Lemmy with my friends because of that. I usually end up screenshotting my own screen because of that.
Every time that happens, I just edit it in my gallery and it converts to something that messenger can use
The format was introduced 13 years ago. Meta had the time, and we know they have the resources.
This is 200% on messenger being shit piece of crap software.
Every time I have to fire up my Fb account, I’m stunned at how shit React is. It’s appalling how bad that framework has become. Maybe if they cared about implementing solid code and less about raping your life of metadata in order to sell you the worst products on the planet thru their “partners” things would be better.
Avis Libre gallery can convert images from/to WEBP.
Thanks! I wish the developers at Meta could afford something similar.
.avif is supported by all major browsers but application support sucks.
Indeed. Ready for websites, not everyday media files.
Heh, AOMedia Video Image Format
Yeah it uses the AV1 video codec for compression. Which go figure, works really well for images, too! And the format can do animated images, too.
Cool, a replacement for GIFs too.
Next you’ll tell me you can add sound to it and make AVIFs with sound, won’t you?
spoiler
Someone once said something to the tune of “Imagine if GIFs could have sound”, to which people pointed out that those are just called videos.
As is webp. Animated webps have been a thing this whole time.
Animated webps have been a thing this whole time.
Reading this in Sam Reich’s voice.
Now we just need a Brennan Lee Mulligan flavored fully charged rant about the billionaire class of corporatists forcing webp with its patent encumbrance on us all.
Edit: I kinda ended up channeling him after I started writing a short comment for OP that just kept going. https://lemmy.world/comment/10914387
I actually decided to use avif on my project. But both this and webp is as fast as I know, not supported in any default image viewer on windows. Which is rater annoying, but I moved on to better programs for tgat anyways.
Avif is second to jxl though, some of the downsides of being a video format is that you loose progressive loading (only top to bottom iirc), degrades on re-encodes, and some other things I can’t think of. Avif gets a win because if you have a av1 decoder you already have a avif decoder too! But since it is a video frame essential there are some downsides since some image specific features can’t or won’t be added.
Also if you have video in AV1, you can rip out Group Of Frames from it and package in avif without any loss.
I’ll change my mind about .webp when Microsoft Teams can recognize it as an image and display it correctly.
I’ll say the same thing about teams as I did messenger.
The format was introduced 13 years ago. MS had the time, and we know they have the resources.
This is 200% on teams being shit piece of crap software.
Webp works fine for me now.
The problem is AVIF. I mean I love AVIF (almost as much as JPEG-XL), but it doesn’t work with anything except browser web pages, even after all this time.
My only concern with jpeg xl is… how do you know if the encoded file is losslessly compressed or not?
with jpg and png, one is lossless, one is not. But if all the files have a jxl extension, you can’t know unless the encoder adds metadata for it, right?
I mean the application could tell by looking at how its encoded, right?
Though I acknowledge how problematic “trusting” the app to do that is.
I felt the same way about webp when it came out.
In practice it doesn’t really matter:
- if you’re encoding the file you know how you’re doing it.
- if you’re receiving the file, you get the pixels you get no matter how it was encoded.
- if you’re sending the image through some third party service, they’re going to reencode and mangle it anyway so there’s no point in worrying.
Also, it turned out that even if it’s quite good, lossless webp is rarely seen in the wild because svg is more convenient.
For me webp is always some gif I’m trying to text people, and now I have to go convert it.
I do this little trick where I change .webp to .jpg
Semi-related, I’m still salty about Google’s rejection of JPEG XL. I can’t help but remember this when webp discussion crops up, since Google were the ones who created it.
Why care about JPEG XL?
Because it seems very promising.
source with details.Rejection?
Google started working on JPEG XL support for chrome, then dropped it despite significant industry support. Apple is also in, by the way.
Why do that?
Don’t know, many possible reasons. In fairness, even Mozilla hasn’t decided to fully invest in it, and
libjxlhasn’t defined a stable public API yet.That said, I don’t believe that’s the kind of issue that’d stop Google if they wanted to push something forward. They’d find a way, funding, helping development, something.
And unfortunately for all of us, Google Chrome sort of… Immensely influences what the web is and will be. They can’t excuse themselves saying “they’ll work on it, if it gains traction” when them supporting anything is fundamental to it gaining traction in the first place.
You’d have to believe Google is acting in good faith for the sake of the internet and its users. I don’t think I need to explain why that’s far from guaranteed and in many issues incredibly unlikely.
Useless mini-rant
I really need a single page with all this information I can link every time image standards in the web are mentioned. There’s stuff I’m leaving out because writing these comments takes some work, especially on a phone, and I’m kinda tired of doing it.
I still hold hope for JPEG XL and that Google will cave at some point.
Just imagine if there was an actual open consortium not spearheaded by monied commercial interests that could temper recent Google decisions. They’ve lost a lot, if not all, of their goodwill with old guard, open web standards nerds. And the old guard that still actively support their standards influencing schemes now make too much money to stop.
Yes, JPEG XL really is the one that got away. 😭
Hey Google, 🖕🖕 for killing it, man. Very evil and self-centered choice.
Also I just noticed what the arrow in the image pointed to. Holy crap that would be awful if true.
Yeah, sorry, that part I didn’t fact check myself so I didn’t even want to mention it. Like I said, many possible reasons.
Ah no worries. I found it a little bit difficult to believe that the decision wouldn’t be questioned by the company if it didn’t align with its overall goals. That would be weird.
Not sure what you mean by “Google killed it”. JPEG XL proposal was only submitted in 2018 and it got standardized in 2022. It has a lot of features which are not available in browsers yet, like HDR support (support for HDR photos in Chrome on Android was only added 8 months ago, Firefox doesn’t support HDR in any shape at all), no browsers support 32 bits per component, there’s no support for thermal data or volume data, etc. You can’t just plug libjxl and call it a day, you have to rework your rendering pipeline to add all these features.
I’d argue that Google is actually working pretty hard on their pipeline to add missing features. Can’t say the same about Mozilla, who can’t even implement HDR for videos for over a decade now.
Can you provide a source on how Google is working hard on JPEG-XL missing features?
They removed JPEG XL support from chrome. It was behind a feature flag previously.
(At least that’s what I gathered from reading the screenshot.)
Yeah, why keep a feature which doesn’t work? Once they add missing stuff to the renderer, they’ll add XL support back. But I guess that will take a few years.
I use the Firefox extension Save WebP as PNG or JPEG (Converter).
I got excited when I saw this post because I knew someone in the comments would have a solution!
Same. Very useful.
Linux and Android handles .webp just fine tho, in windows try open source image viewer like imageglass and everything gonna work just fine, speaking from experience i had, just as most people here i hated that webp doesn’t open until i understood that open source image viewers handle it just fine, then i liked that file format cause it’s versatile i mean, it can be picture or animation like gif, and compression feels better
Linux and Android handles .webp just fine tho
I can’t speak for all distros and DEs, and I also don’t do many image related things, but I’m using Linux Mint Cinnamon and the default desktop background manager doesn’t support .webp. Sometimes I see a cool image that I want to use and I have to convert it; other times, when I notice it’s .webp, I just give up on that image.
Strange, I’m using lmde6 and it handles everything just fine, i just rechecked it and it set .webp wallpaper just fine on my lmde6 cinnamon
I’m using XNView since forever and it has support for pretty much any format imaginable, including webp.
I hate .webp, almost no software supports it. I can see it reduces the amount of space, but I’m always having to convert it
That format is awful from a user perspective.
How so. I get that the support isn’t there yet, but how is the format itself awful
The format itself is perfectly fine, it’s just that most software doesn’t work with formats made in the 21st century
Literally, you answered your own question. From the user end, unsupported file types of any frequently shared format are garbage. No one cares on the user end about server space. They care about sharing a funny image. They don’t care about 2 extra ms of load speed. They want shit to just work.
It’s the same reason Open Office sucks. You can’t rely on it to just work. As much as dev’s hate it (myself too), reliability is king. Webp fails this measure, badly.
Why? I use it all the time and never had issues with it
The only program that I ever use that doesn’t support webp is Facebook Messenger.
Lucky
It performs like trash when trying to copy to text messages.
convert image.webp image.pngOn Android, use Share image from Firefox or similar, then click the edit icon before sharing (on the share sheet that pops up), then just immediately share without modifications. It’ll share it as a new PNG I’m pretty sure. Dang Facebook Messenger that won’t accept WebP and I have to do this so many times.
Facebook Messenger
That’s your problem right there.
Exactly my point.
