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
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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)
I’ll change my mind about .webp when Microsoft Teams can recognize it as an image and display it correctly.
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 libjxl hasn’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.
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.
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.
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.)
Can you provide a source on how Google is working hard on JPEG-XL missing features?
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.
Is this some windows problem I’m too FOSS to understand?
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)
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.
