[opensource-dev] WebP, a new image format for the Web

[SuezanneC Baskerville]

Google is putting out a new open source image format, said to offer higher
compression rates than JPEG2000.

I just thought someone with the appropriate technical knowledge ought to
take a look at in case it might be useful for use in Second Life.

http://blog.chromium.org/2010/09/webp-new-image-format-for-web.html<%20http://blog.chromium.org/2010/09/webp-new-image-format-for-web.html>

*To improve on the compression that JPEG provides, we used an image
> compressor based on the VP8 codec that Google open-sourced<http://blog.webmproject.org/2010/05/introducing-webm-open-web-media-project.html>in May 2010. We applied the techniques from VP8 video intra frame coding to
> push the envelope in still image coding. We also adapted a very lightweight
> container based on RIFF<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Interchange_File_Format>.
> While this container format contributes a minimal overhead of only 20 bytes
> per image, it is extensible to allow authors to save meta-data they would
> like to store.
>
> 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.
> *


http://code.google.com/speed/webp/
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