JPEG to be replaced by WebP ? Google hope so

The Joint Photographic Experts Group format (or JPEG as it is more commonly known) has become such a part of our lives in 2010, it is hard to image it ever being replaced. If Google have their way however, their new image format called ‘WeBp' will do just that.

Google are promoting this file format heavily – they say that 65 percent of all content accessed by the Web is image based. If those files were reencoded with WebP then they would be 39 percent smaller than other formats, which would not only mean faster delivery, but less load on a plethora of servers.

JPEG is called a lossy standard, which means that the image fidelity is compromised when it is saved or re-encoded. While files like PNG use lossless compression, they are much larger, especially when they are large picture files.

“To improve on the compression that JPEG provides, we used an image compressor based on the VP8 codec that Google open-sourced in May 2010,” Richard Rabbat, a product manager for Google, wrote in a blog post. “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.”

If you would like to look at creating some images in this format, then grab the conversion tool over here. Just be aware that no browser, as yet, supports this format. We suspect this will change once Google use their considerable clout to convince companies to start supporting it. Want more technical data on the format? then read this page.

KitGuru says: The death of JPEG? we can't imagine this happening for a very, very long time.

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