New version of libwebp (version 0.1.99) with Alpha & Lossless is rolled out today.

[Vikas Arora]

Hi -

Last few months, WebP team has been working on adding two enhancement features to WebP format v.i.z Alpha Channel support and Lossless support. Today we pushed out the next version of libwebp (ver 0.1.99), that contains these two features. The archives are available at [1] and the git repository has been tagged 'v0.1.99'. The iOS-App has been updated too with the latest codec and WIC coded will be updated soon. This is a pre-release of version 0.2.0, to allow for further incompatible changes based on user feedback.  We encourage community to try out these two features and provide any feedback on the format.

Last week we also published the study with compression and decompression characteristics of WebP with these two (Alpha & Lossless) newly added features and compared them with libpng and pngout. It was shown in the study that with these two new features, 97% of the Lossless (PNG) web images can be better compressed and one can relatively easily change these from PNG to WebP format. WebP with default compression settings can compress 34% better than libpng and 25% better than pngout. This suggests that WebP is promising for speeding up image heavy websites.

In addition to adding these two new features, following changes (from NEWS file) have been done since last release (V0.1.3):

- Add TIFF input support to cwebp (webp encoder).

- Deprecated function WebPINew() has been removed.

- Decode function signatures have changed to consistently use size_t over int/uint32_t.

- decode_vp8.h is no longer installed system-wide.

[1]: http://code.google.com/p/webp/downloads/list

Thanks & Regards,

Vikas

[Pascal Massimino]

Hi,

note also that the doc site has been updated to incorporate the latest changes, too. In particular:

  * the API description:  https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/docs/api

  * the RIFF container description: https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/docs/riff_container

As Vikas mentioned, this release is about having a frozen API that incorporates transparency

and lossless support (transparently [pun intended!] for high-level functions). ABI should be stabilized too.

Underneath, of course, things are still open to feedback if it appears something is really missing or

vastly sub-optimal! The goal is to have the bitstream spec frozen in 0.2.0 to something we're

fully comfortable with.

Meanwhile, expect some parameter tuning and default settings adjustments on the road to 0.2.0.

 

Also, there's more container additions to come post 0.2.0 (actually, some code is already

in the tree, cf. src/mux/*), but let's take a moment to be sure the new chunks are fit to the intended

use (tiles, animation, color profile, etc.)

skal

[1]: http://code.google.com/p/webp/downloads/list

Thanks & Regards,

Vikas

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[Pascal Massimino]

On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 4:21 PM, Pascal Massimino <pascal.m...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 3:07 PM, Vikas Arora <vik...@google.com> wrote:

Hi -

Last few months, WebP team has been working on adding two enhancement features to WebP format v.i.z Alpha Channel support and Lossless support. Today we pushed out the next version of libwebp (ver 0.1.99), that contains these two features. The archives are available at [1] and the git repository has been tagged 'v0.1.99'. The iOS-App has been updated too with the latest codec and WIC coded will be updated soon. This is a pre-release of version 0.2.0, to allow for further incompatible changes based on user feedback.  We encourage community to try out these two features and provide any feedback on the format.

Last week we also published the study with compression and decompression characteristics of WebP with these two (Alpha & Lossless) newly added features and compared them with libpng and pngout. It was shown in the study that with these two new features, 97% of the Lossless (PNG) web images can be better compressed and one can relatively easily change these from PNG to WebP format. WebP with default compression settings can compress 34% better than libpng and 25% better than pngout. This suggests that WebP is promising for speeding up image heavy websites.

In addition to adding these two new features, following changes (from NEWS file) have been done since last release (V0.1.3):

- Add TIFF input support to cwebp (webp encoder).

- Deprecated function WebPINew() has been removed.

- Decode function signatures have changed to consistently use size_t over int/uint32_t.

- decode_vp8.h is no longer installed system-wide.

note also that the doc site has been updated to incorporate the latest changes, too. In particular:

  * the API description:  https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/docs/api

  * the RIFF container description: https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/docs/riff_container

... aaaand i forgot to mention the link to the WebP Lossless bitstream specification:

https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/docs/webp_lossless_bitstream_specification

 which is pretty much the HTML version of the text available from the source tree.

Comments welcome!

skal

[Frédéric Kayser]

That's a nice step forward!

Could you gather some stats from your test files?
I'm curious to know which WebP lossless features are actually used (type and number of transforms, frequency of each predictor, color cache size, number of meta Huffman codes in the entropy image...).
Is there an easy way to produce WebP lossless files without transforms, entropy image, color cache, that could be used as a baseline reference?

[Pascal Massimino]

Hi Frédéric

On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 6:21 AM, Frédéric Kayser <cry...@free.fr> wrote:

That's a nice step forward!

Could you gather some stats from your test files?

good suggestion! let's get started with: https://gerrit.chromium.org/gerrit/#change,28155

More to come, but that's a start. I'd like to keep the stats light and avoid heavy scans though...

 

I'm curious to know which WebP lossless features are actually used (type and number of transforms, frequency of each predictor, color cache size, number of meta Huffman codes in the entropy image...). 

Is there an easy way to produce WebP lossless files without transforms, entropy image, color cache, that could be used as a baseline reference?

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[James Zern]

On Tuesday, July 24, 2012 4:59:04 PM UTC-7, skal wrote:

Hi Frédéric

On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 6:21 AM, Frédéric Kayser <cry...@free.fr> wrote:

That's a nice step forward!

Could you gather some stats from your test files?

good suggestion! let's get started with: https://gerrit.chromium.org/gerrit/#change,28155

More to come, but that's a start. I'd like to keep the stats light and avoid heavy scans though...

This was merged to the release branch: https://gerrit.chromium.org/gerrit/#change,28332

That will be merged into master after 0.2.0 is tagged.

[Spineanu Radu]

Is there a Chronium/Chrome release that incorporates 0.1.99?

- Thank you,
R.

[Pascal Massimino]

On Aug 13, 2012 10:32 PM, <literatur...@googlemail.com> wrote:

>
> Spineanu Radu wrote:
>
>> Is there a Chronium/Chrome release that incorporates 0.1.99?
>>

> Hello,
> google-chrome-unstable (22.0.1229.2-r150678) is build with v0.2.0-rc1.

Note: WebKit needs a refresh too, which is taken care of at https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93430

>
>
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[Spineanu Radu]

I couldn't find that exact build so I tested with Google Canary 23.0.1237.0 canary.

Unfortunately the webp I created isn't animating in this version. I'm not sure if it's me doing something wrong, or if that version of Canary was not built with the latest libwebp.

-R.

On Monday, August 13, 2012 4:02:36 PM UTC+3, literatur...@googlemail.com wrote:

Spineanu Radu wrote:

Is there a Chronium/Chrome release that incorporates 0.1.99?

[James Zern]

On Thursday, August 16, 2012 11:30:25 AM UTC-7, Spineanu Radu wrote:

I couldn't find that exact build so I tested with Google Canary 23.0.1237.0 canary.

Unfortunately the webp I created isn't animating in this version. I'm not sure if it's me doing something wrong, or if that version of Canary was not built with the latest libwebp.

This release doesn't include animation, tiling, etc. Only the lossless bitstream and lossy+alpha were finalized.