There is a new image format called BPG (Better Portable Graphics) designed by the French programmer Fabrice Bellard and it promises to deliver better visual quality at half the file size of JPEG! Can BPG unseat the aging but popular JPEG format?
JPEG has been around for over 20 years and has become THE accepted means of displaying images on the web. As our web experience grows ever more visual, and as mobile browsing becomes the preferred method for many folks, JPEG begins to show its limitations. Along comes Fabrice Bellard, the creator of FFMPEG and QEMU, to show us that there might be a better way!
BPG is a format based off the H.265 video codec by utilizing the open source x265. This means BPG offers the ability to render 14 bits per color channel as opposed to 8 with JPEG. This is great news for us photographers as we can take full advantage of our displays and cameras dynamic range. It also offers an alpha channel, and a lossless compression option.
To give BPG a test run and see how it compares to JPEG you can go HERE and go through a variety of Before/After images.
Naturally the problem is that BPG has absolutely no native support at the moment. Perhaps this will change in the near future. With all the benefits, especially regarding size, it is hard to imagine that this would not one day become the new standard.
[via ExtremeTech]
Ohh interesting! =)
Well, this is the best thing to hear about this week, i wasn't a big fan of Jpeg compression. Thanks for letting us know about it Peter
The question though, is it possible to get our hands on it and try it out ourselves. I believe that this is a conversion via tool that he designed to convert any RAW file into this format, so do you have any info regarding this tool even if its in beta version ?
incredible
This.changes.everything :)
hmmm. interesting. kinda surprised it took 20 years to think of something new.
I'm not.
Up until now (early 2010s) the need for ti wasn't there.
Now there is MUCH more pictures transfered everyday and everyone consumes those images on mobile devices that don't have the capabilities of desktops or laptops. I'd say this is a result of a rather recent demand in social media (Facebook having to save alllll those picture would be more than happy to have this format!).
This reminds me of season 1 of Silicon Valley. Pied Piper is real.
WOW!! i have really been hating Facebook's Jpg compression lately and to hear that it will HALF the file size plus add an alpha channel? that could mean some big stuff in the world of photography and graphics
I've tried it.
1) Very very slow encoder, stop thinking about realtime encoding from other formats.
2) I didn't find any viewer, so the BNG isn't popular :)
3) JPEG (5MB) was encoded in 1.2MB. Very good! But result of decoding was DNG in 22MB and with artefacts (lost in detailes)
So, may be in future...
looks like it has potential. Until widespread adoption, JPEGmini is my goto.
JPEG 2000 anyone?
Other formats _were_ invented. Didn´t help though.
PNG is not even fully supported, and with faster internet I see better quality jpg happening sooner. But we can only hope. Pretty sure Instagram, twitter and Facebook will be the big deciders on this one. If they like the bandwidth saved by the format and push it, it will explode. Shame about the stupid name though. .iff would have been cool haha
From a web design standpoint, if BPG were to support transparency then it's a potential outright winner. Having to work with a mixture of JPG (for compression) and PNG (for transparency but less compression) is currently non-optimal...
Holy crap this looks amazing!
This really needs to be made into a real thing, replacing jpg is way over due.