Is it still a meme when you feel it in your soul?
I don't know why, maybe because it's Sunday morning and I'm just drinking my coffee and browsing around while the rest of the house sleeps in, but this triggered a rabbit hole for me. I already have a lil plugin just for quickly saving direct to PNG or JPG when I right click a WebP in my browsers, but I SHOULDN'T GODDAMN HAVE TO.
WEBP as a wrapper (as coupled along with AVIF/AV1/VP8/etc) seems all about reassertion of corporate control of web file formats by pivoting codecs back toward patent encumbrance as a control factor, just without universal royalty hooks attached to anyone that touches even free and open software utilizing it. We were actually FREE of that bullshit for a short time. PNG has no patent encumbrance. GIF, MP3, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2 all have expired patents and can be used freely.
[Don't get me wrong, MPEG as an org was and is pure corruption and greed, and MPEG-4 Part 2 adoption was fully diminished outside of 'free' circles based on their stated intention to apply a 'content fee' to the royalty requirements. It's obvious why VP8 -> AV1 had to happen one way or another to break their royalty cabal insanity, but it still doesn't taste good at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_Part_2 ]
The consortium of companies behind WebP and AV1 are all taking part in the enshittification of the entire technology sector, from web sites and web apps, operating systems, and application ecosystems. Why would we ever trust them to not rug pull the 'irrevocable but revocable' patent license scheme? They only put it together in the first place to end run having to pay someone who was 'not them' any royalties for image/video/audio encoding.
References:
WEBP is patent encumbered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP
https://github.com/ImageMagick/webp/blob/main/PATENTS
Google hereby grants to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free,** irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license** to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, transfer, and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of these implementations of WebM, where such license applies only to those patent claims, both currently owned by Google and acquired in the future, licensable by Google that are necessarily infringed by these implementations of WebM. This grant does not include claims that would be infringed only as a consequence of further modification of these implementations.
GIF is not patent encumbered since 2004.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF
In 2004, all patents relating to the proprietary compression used for GIF expired.
PNG was never patent encumbered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNG
PNG was developed as an improved, non-patented replacement for Graphics Interchange Format (GIF)—unofficially, the initials PNG stood for the recursive acronym "PNG's not GIF".
AV1, VP8, VP9, and other modernized "open source" or "free" Video Codecs all appear to be patent encumbered.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23747923
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1
The technology that managed to accomplish what NFTs couldn't.
Semi-related, I'm still salty about Google's rejection of JPEG XL. I can't help but remember this when webp discussion crops up, since Google were the ones who created it.
Why care about JPEG XL?
Because it seems very promising.
source with details.Rejection?
Google started working on JPEG XL support for chrome, then dropped it despite significant industry support. Apple is also in, by the way.
Why do that?
Don't know, many possible reasons. In fairness, even Mozilla hasn't decided to fully invest in it, and
libjxlhasn't defined a stable public API yet.That said, I don't believe that's the kind of issue that'd stop Google if they wanted to push something forward. They'd find a way, funding, helping development, something.
And unfortunately for all of us, Google Chrome sort of... Immensely influences what the web is and will be. They can't excuse themselves saying "they'll work on it, if it gains traction" when them supporting anything is fundamental to it gaining traction in the first place.
You'd have to believe Google is acting in good faith for the sake of the internet and its users. I don't think I need to explain why that's far from guaranteed and in many issues incredibly unlikely.
Useless mini-rant
I really need a single page with all this information I can link every time image standards in the web are mentioned. There's stuff I'm leaving out because writing these comments takes some work, especially on a phone, and I'm kinda tired of doing it.
I still hold hope for JPEG XL and that Google will cave at some point.
Snipping tool is for snipping, screenshots are for cropping.
I use the Firefox extension Save WebP as PNG or JPEG (Converter).
I do this little trick where I change .webp to .jpg
Linux and Android handles .webp just fine tho, in windows try open source image viewer like imageglass and everything gonna work just fine, speaking from experience i had, just as most people here i hated that webp doesn't open until i understood that open source image viewers handle it just fine, then i liked that file format cause it's versatile i mean, it can be picture or animation like gif, and compression feels better
I don't understand what people's problem with this format is except in the case of animated .gifs. I can view it. I can reupload it. It's still an image and it still works. The exception is animations. Animations always end up as a still image when saved in that format.
ffmpeg <3
Ezgif.com has a webp converter
Seems like just another file format to me.
I do this little trick where I change .webp to .jpg
its not hard to extract the image or video from the webp container.
