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by throwasehasdwi 3305 days ago
Nokia owns several HEVC patents, in fact I think they're currently suing apple about it. This is a veiled attempt to get everyone to use their patented tech so we can relive the mp3/mp4 clusterfuck. You would be a fool to use this for anything.

What's so bad about WebP? It's not the best thing in the universe but it beats JPEG and PNG and has a wide support base. With a shim it has native support in most browsers anyways since WebP is a just a single frame of video. And as a bonus you don't have to worry about someone suing you for royalties down the road.
3 comments
pornel 3305 days ago
> What's so bad about WebP?

WebP is based on VP8, which is now obsolete. It was meant to be a H.264 competitor, a generation behind H.265 and VP9/VP10. WebP compression efficiency is much closer to JPEG than H.265.

This format beats WebP by a margin wider than WebP was smaller than JPEG.

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throwasehasdwi 3297 days ago
Most devices still encode and decode far more H264 and JPEG than newer generations. We shouldn't be stuck with the horse and buggy because we're waiting for cars to be autonomous. WebP is superior to JPEG and the most widely available alternative.
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emn13 3304 days ago
And people today still use jpeg routinely, so I'm not sure any of that is really a killing blow.
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cflat 3304 days ago
>What's so bad about WebP?

* Lack of clear spec ("The code is the spec")

* Lack of versioning of spec (at least 3 major versions with different capabilities/features of which not all degrade nicely)

* Forced 4:2:0 chroma subsampling

* 8bit-channel only (no support for 10bit+ aka wide-gamut images)

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astrange 3304 days ago
WebP should not have been released. It was created by skal right before Google released VP8, and nobody had any time to work on the actual format or even see it before it was frozen. You could easily beat it in quality by now.
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