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Why BPG will replace GIFs and not only.

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Let’s start with some history.

BPG (Better Portable Graphics) is a new image format with the purpose to replace JPEG image format when quality or file size is an issue.

  • By Fabrice Bellard

This means that BPG not only is way smaller than JPEG but also delivers a better quality. And that’s not all! It also supports animations!

And when I say animation, I actually say GIF-like movies with MP4 quality that are actually smaller than the mp4 it was built from.

Let’s see an example (I have not included a GIF example because the same quality size and frame rate means that the GIF will have exactly 33.8MB)

So let’s go:


mp4, 25fps, 927kb
canvas
bpg, 25fps, 518kb

The movie is called Ambition and you can view it on Findie.

Spot the differences? 🙂

  • There’s none (the mp4 doesn’t include audio, and neither does the BPG.)

Advantages?

  • Animation support. You can have a GIF half the size of an MP4.
  • Video inline play (but without sound). One of the biggest problems is that on Mobile Safari no video can be played inline. GIFs solve, and when we have GIFs that are 5% the size of the original, that’s epic!
  • High compression ratio. Smaller than a JPG and even smaller than Google’s WebP with similar quality if not better.
  • You can start using today with a Javascript decoder (gzipped size: 56 KB).
  • And plenty other.

GIFs today are not even GIFs anymore. With the release of Imgur’s gifv the internet went nuts for nothing more than a mp4 that has autoplay, and if mp4’s are not supported, or autoplay is disabled (mobiles), they’re replaced with very low quality GIFs.

Downsides?

We got just a few…

  • Decompiling time! – Current example is around 8-10s (the bigger the file, the slower the decompiling)… This would be easily solved if browsers would add native support.
  • Main thread blocking while decompiling large files.
  • No sound support (but who cares, this is image encoding, we’re not talking better video formats).

So what can we do?

Why not go ahead and promote it so that browsers actually support it. Or you can start using it today, it requires some CPU processing, but hey! We’re saving bandwidth! 😀

For example there’s a feature request on the Bugzilla Tracker of Firefox – here

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