Fantastic Fabrice Bellard released a new image format: BPG

It sports lossless and lossy compression and is available today for the web.

Available in browsers already? How!
Well this comes from the man who wrote a PC Emulator in Javascript 3 years ago 🙂
So he implemented a small Javascript decoder for BPG: problem solved!

My favorite features are that BPG is future-proof

Finally a lossy compression format not limited to 8 bits colors
It matters because it's impossible to represent a smooth gradient on 8 bits without resorting to dithering.
Dithering destroys compression ratios or is destroyed by lossy compression.
Now that we're evolving towards larger color gamuts (wide gamut displays are out here for 5+ years), 10 to 12 bits sampling rate is even more of requirement.

Can be hardware-accelerated
Because it's based on a subset of HEVC video compression, it can be decoded and encoded by dedicated chips available on your next mobile SoC.
Well, hardware HEVC encoding not quite yet but decoding arrives soon.
Today, JPEG encoding and decoding is accelerated system-wise (including for browsers) on every mobile system.
BPG design allows to get the same speed and power efficiency.

My least favorite feature is: oh noes software patents, because HEVC.

I look forward to an updated comparison between BPG and a WebP based on VP9.

Discussion ongoing on Hacker News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8704629

#supercurioBlog #image #compression #codec



BPG Image format
BPG Image format. Introduction. BPG (Better Portable Graphics) is a new image format. Its purpose is to replace the JPEG image format when quality or file size is an issue. Its main advantages are: High compression ratio. Files are much smaller than JPEG for similar quality.

Source post on Google+

Published by

François Simond

Mobile engineer & analyst specialized in, display, camera color calibration, audio tuning

4 thoughts on “Fantastic Fabrice Bellard released a new image format: BPG”

  1. Oh wow. I read a bit and it seems awesome.
    I was originally hoping for WebP, but this seems far more promising. I hope it takes off.
    Although I agree that patents could be a problem. I'd rather see open stuff than closed.

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