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

  • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • over_clox@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • IronKrill@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • over_clox@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Oh, I forgot to mention in my other comment, as far as compression goes, what ever happened to good old MIDI? 🤔

          • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • over_clox@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I’m looking at a MIDI file in a hex editor right now, it’s literally not a plain text file. Plain text files use carriage return and/or line feed characters to end a line of text. MIDI uses null to separate instrument notes and attributes.

              Also, when was the last time you tried opening a MIDI file? Seems like half the media player apps and even some operating systems don’t even natively support it anymore.

              • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Ok apologies. But you get my point, it’s a set of instructions made for actual hardware with built-in samples. I don’t think there’s any such thing in modern computers even beyond emulation on OS level.

                Sound players are made to play sound, not instructions, and most people don’t need to play MIDIs. Even so, the actual playback experience then depends on the OS/hardware/whatever, which again is not something you expect from a sound player.

                You can always use specific software to play MIDIs, which are better equipped for it with stuff like MIDI font support, instrument selection and other stuff.

        • over_clox@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I never said GIF was all that great. Hell, beyond the fact that it was piss poor compression, it didn’t even have audio. 🤦‍♂️

          Now MPEG1/2, MP3 and JPEG weren’t all that bad, considering the era of technology they came from.

          I can definitely agree that modern compression has improved beyond that even, but at the same time now everything is automatically tagging in all sorts of extra data like, I dunno, the GPS location the image/video was taken. Like hey, let’s just broadcast everyone’s address to the rest of the world…

            • over_clox@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Of course, yes, you can. But back then, that was usually up to the person recording the media to manually add metadata later in processing.

              These days everything is getting tagged automatically as you’re recording stuff.

              Bye bye privacy.

      • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        So was QuickTime and RealMedia. Today we know how to compress things better.

        Agree with the HTML sadly… Sigh.

    • elephantium@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It is more efficient. I thought it’s obvious, that’s why web sites use it, to save traffic and potentially storage. Hence my comparison to video formats. You don’t see YouTube playing videos in Real Media format.

        It’s also more universal, combining features of jpg, png and gif. Gif especially is a dreadful format for what it’s commonly used. It was designed for tiny clipart animations, not HD video clips. Something like x265 can actually be hundreds of times more efficient.

    • toasteecup@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I mean for audio I use these large mostly black disk things…

      For nonphysical media I’m a filthy streaming whore.

    • venusenvy47@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Do you know if there are any formats that provide for native looping like gif? I find that feature useful for some standalone files.

            • DrQuint@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              No, lol.

              It stands for animated png btw. It was an extension. The benefit was that it always rendered something everywhere, if it didn’t support the animation, because it would be read out as a regular (but suspiciously heavy) png in that case.

              I brought it up because it’s yet another old-ass .gif solution that didn’t stick because people love the term “gif”.

      • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I think PNG is a good format even today. It’s lossless compressed, so there isn’t that much you can squeeze out of that with new algorithms as you can out of lossy formats with new and smarter approaches.

        Sadly, PNG is being terribly misused on the internet too. What it’s good for is simple drawn graphics, which it can compress to oblivion. So it’s perfect for screenshots of say, your operating system’s windows. I took a sshot as I’m typing this, and it came out as 190 kB. Not bad.

        But what it’s so commonly used for, is people taking screenshots of photos such as from Instagram, and then reposting them. So instead of a tiny and shitty 50 kB IG picture, you get a 1.5MB PNG screenshots. Some then recompress it to a 1.5MB JPG for “maximum quality” when they realise they can’t upload PNG to photo sites.

        I also very often encounter huge PNG photos with their extensions changed to JPG, and I don’t know how or why that is happening.

        • elephantium@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          people taking screenshots of photos such as from Instagram

          This one really grinds my gears. Why do so many people insist on sharing text by taking a picture instead of pasting the text? Or better yet, just linking to the original? It’s such a waste of bandwidth :(

      • qaz@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It supports features such as lossless editing and transparency but the compression is pretty bad.

        • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It’s lossless, it’s meant for 2D and drawn graphics. Can’t do that much with lossless compression.

        • Shurimal@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          PNG compresses like nothing else when it comes to graphs, text, UI elements, digital drawings, comics, screenshots from apps etc. And doesn’t suffer from “mosquito” artifacts and other .jpg nonsense. It was never meant to be used for photographs and other statistically “noisy” images for which .jpg works much better.

          • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Isn’t it funny how the internet is full of Instagram screenshots in PNG, and Twitter screenshots in JPG?

            It feels like some extra-dimensional aliens are fucking with us and making everything backwards.

    • Atemu@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      For music, we use some variant of mp4 or lossless

      AAC is only 5 years younger than JPEG. Lossless music formats are about as ancient as GIF.

      • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        But requirements for audio hasn’t changed that much, and overall it’s a much older and thus mature technology, that there isn’t much left to figure out. Consumer CD format with 16bit 44.1kHz has been around for 40 years, and you don’t need much better quality than that. So there isn’t much left to figure out.

        But images and videos are different. 20 or 30 years ago you didn’t need to commonly send 20 MPix HDR photos and HD to 4k videos over the internet. Shoehorning formats that were made for 640x480 pictures and tiny silly clipart animations just doesn’t make sense, especially with all the development that’s been made in that time. Newer compression techniques can help, but you can only do so much.

        • elephantium@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Shoehorning formats that were made for 640x480 pictures

          Err…nothing in the file format spec restricts jpg to a particular size. I would actually argue that this undermines your point – bandwidth was incredibly limited in the 90s compared to what I see today.

          Simple example: a 640x480 image is (at least) 307,200 bytes = 0.3M, so it takes at least 5.4 seconds to transmit over a 56k modem. A 4k image, same color depth, is 16000000 bytes = 15M. On a gigabit connection (what I have), that takes about 0.02 seconds.

          • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I was taking more about quality than size in this particular comparison. In 1993 you were happy to squeeze through an image in any quality almost.

            It goes hand in hand tho.

            If you can compress a 50 MPix, 16-bit, high dynamic range image from a modern high-end DSLR to a reasonable size with a better algorithm and format, you’d also have an easier time squeezing a crappy 640x480 pic to an even smaller size. We just couldn’t do either so well 30 years ago.

            • elephantium@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Heh, in 1993 I wasn’t online at all. '97 or '98 is more like it in my case.

              That’s a fair point, too, better image quality for a given size. I was more focused on raw bandwidth demands.