WebP, a new image format for the Web (The Chromium Blog)

On its Chromium Blog, Google has announced a new image format called WebP. It is based on techniques from Google's recently open-sourced VP8 video codec and shows some significant size reductions for image data. There is also a gallery available to compare original and WebP-compressed images. "While the benefits of a VP8 based image format were clear in theory, we needed to test them in the real world. In order to gauge the effectiveness of our efforts, we randomly picked about 1,000,000 images from the web (mostly JPEGs and some PNGs and GIFs) and re-encoded them to WebP without perceptibly compromising visual quality. This resulted in an average 39% reduction in file size. We expect that developers will achieve in practice even better file size reduction with WebP when starting from an uncompressed image." (Thanks to Martin Jeppesen.)

Comments (33 posted)