14 DAY TRIAL // JPEG was, is and continues to be one of the most popular image formats in the whole world, but this thing could change in the coming years if a new format called BPG gains enough fans.
BPG, which stands for Better Portable Graphics, is an alternative to the standard JPEG format, offering the exact same quality, but with a 50 percent decrease in file size. Does this sound too good to be true? Read on to find out.
First and foremost, this new image format is the creation of French programmer Fabrice Bellard, the same person who created FFMpeg, QEMU, and the Tiny C Compiler, so given his past activity, there's no doubt that this new project is at least worth a look.
As he mentions on the official website of BPG, this new image format comes with superior compression ratio, so it can maintain the same quality as an original JPG, but it also reduces size by 50 percent.
Implementing BPG is not that hard and Bellard says that all web-browsers could support it with the help of a Javascript decoder that weighs in only 55 KB.
JPEG-like specs
BPG is not too different from JPEG and it even has the same chroma formats (grayscale, YCbCr 4:2:0, 4:2:2, 4:4:4), while also supporting an alpha channel, RGB, YCgCo and CMYK color spaces.
You won't feel any difference if you replace JPEG with BPG, the developer guarantees, because metadata is also supported, so EXIF information can be added as well.
‘What about performance?’ you might ask. Once again, BPG seems to be the better option.
In essence, BPG is based on a subset of the popular HEVC open video compression standard, which offers it a pretty significant advantage in terms of performance. Bellard pointed to a test conducted by Mozilla to explain that BPG files are loaded faster by browsers than JPEG.
“HEVC (hence BPG) was a clear winner by a wide margin. BPG files are actually a little smaller than raw HEVC files because the BPG header is smaller than the corresponding HEVC header,” he said.
As you can see in the photo gallery below, this visual comparison tool is living proof that the BPG image format indeed cuts the file size in half without any impact in photo quality.
As a conclusion, it could take months or even years to see BPG replacing JPEG, but the advantages it brings are unquestionable, so maybe large tech companies should really have a look at it.
