New super image format for the web — BPG
It was about time that new image formats appear for the web. I found out about BPG completely by chance and it was a remarkable find!
BPG stands for “Better Portable Graphics” and it aims to replace JPG, PNG and GIF.
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.
- Supported by most Web browsers with a small Javascript decoder (gzipped size: 56 KB).
- Based on a subset of the HEVC open video compression standard.
- Supports the same chroma formats as JPEG (grayscale, YCbCr 4:2:0, 4:2:2, 4:4:4) to reduce the losses during the conversion. An alpha channel is supported. The RGB, YCgCo and CMYK color spaces are also supported.
- Native support of 8 to 14 bits per channel for a higher dynamic range.
- Lossless compression is supported.
- Various metadata (such as EXIF, ICC profile, XMP) can be included.
- Animation support.
I have seen compression results and they are simply amazing!
This is all highest possible compression.
Next stop — animations. Yes, BPG can do that as well. Did I mention that both images and animations have 8-bit alpha channel (support for transparency)?
Go to animation page and witness this awesomeness for yourself.
Best part is — we can already use some of this in our own creations. All we need is HTML5 capable browser and we can display these images and animations inside of <canvas> elements. You can find JS needed to display these images embedded in example pages.
Web is looking better each time I look at it :)
