WEBP CONVERTER CNET SOFTWARE

The company wants WebP to be used beyond just its own servers. Image-quality techies also will want to look at Google's detailed studies comparing WebM to JPEG and JPEG 2000. With Chrome as a vehicle and Google's Web properties as a destination, neither of those need be universally adopted for Google to benefit.įor some more details on WebP, check Google's blog post on it or the open-source WebP project site, which includes an FAQ, the WebP converter command-line tool, and gallery.

WEBP CONVERTER CNET SOFTWARE

Google's doing the same thing with other Web technologies, for example by building into Chrome the SPDY protocol to speed interactions with Web servers, and the Native Client software to run downloadable software at native rather than JavaScript speeds. Because Google has some very popular Web pages along with a widely used if not dominant browser, the company can make something practical and real out of technology that in another company's hands would be merely academic unless it signed up partners. That browser move is where Google's efforts to speed up the Web are interesting. 'We expect in a few weeks we will have native support for WebP in Chrome,' Rabbat said. At first that will include a utility to convert graphics into WebP images, but more important perhaps in the long run is support built into Google's Chrome browser. Google plans to release WebP software to let people judge image quality for themselves. The remaining 10 percent were formats such as PNG and GIF, which are used more for illustration images such as logos rather than the photo-oriented JPEG. Of them, about 90 percent were JPEG, and Google's tests showed WebP offering the same quality with 40 percent smaller file sizes. The higher compression efficiency measurement came from a sample of 1 million images that Google plucked from the Web. WebP is derived from WebM, Google's open-source, royalty-free technology for encoding and decoding video. 'Initially, we want to spread this widely on the Web.' 'We're talking to other browser vendors about supporting WebP,' he said. It's begun that conversation with some that share Google's faster-Web motivations: browser makers. 'We foresee it's going to be a very long conversation.' 'The challenges are tremendous,' Rabbat said. Google, like Microsoft, knows it's in for a long effort to promote its graphics format. An earlier effort, JPEG 2000, also hasn't much dented JPEG's popularity. But JPEG XR so far hasn't made much progress beyond standardization and native support in Internet Explorer and Windows. Microsoft has been trying for years to promote an alternative, now standardized as the royalty-free JPEG XR format, which offers greater dynamic range, a wider range of colors, and more efficient compression. Shrinking images by that much is particularly important considering that, by Google's estimate, '65 percent of bytes on the Web are from images,' he said. 'When we took a bunch of images, recompressed them from their current lossy formats into WebP, we saw on average about 40 percent decrease in size, which is staggering,' said Richard Rabbat, lead product manager on Google's 'make the Web faster' effort. That's not stopping Google, though, whose goals with WebP are ambitious even if not as ambitious as replacing JPEG. Unlike JPEG, though, it's not built into every camera, Web browser, image-editing program, pharmacy photo-printing kiosk, and mainstream operating system in existence. And like JPEG, it's a 'lossy' format, meaning it doesn't perfectly reproduce an original image but tries to keep as true to the original as possible when viewed by the human eye. WebP, like JPEG, lets its users trade off image quality for file size. In its WebP incarnation, the image is 36,154 bytes. Because browsers can't show WebP natively today, this WebP image actually is displayed here as a PNG graphic that captures the WebP version without changes. That translates to faster file transfers and lower network burden if Google can convince people to adopt WebP. Google plans to announce the new WebP graphics format today along with its research that indicates its use could cut image file sizes by 40 percent compared to today's dominant JPEG file format. The company also wants to revolutionize still images on the Web with a new format called WebP. It turns out there was more to Google's WebM technology than just a plan to revolutionize Web-based video.

Webp converter cnet