Submission + - Google creates a new image format for the web (blogspot.com) 2
krou writes: Wanting to find a way to further compress lossy images like JPEG in a way that preserves quality and resolution, but shrinks the file size so that it makes the image load faster, Google has created a new image format called WebP 'that promises to significantly reduce the byte size of photos on the web, allowing web sites to load faster than before'. The compressor is based on the VP8 codec that Google open-sourced in May, 2010. 'In order to gauge the effectiveness of our efforts, we randomly picked about 1,000,000 images from the web (mostly JPEGs and some PNGs and GIFs) and re-encoded them to WebP without perceptibly compromising visual quality. This resulted in an average 39% reduction in file size.' They've set up a comparison site of open source and classic images for developers to assess quality.