webp is a good format that's saddled with lousy adoption. Back in the day people avoided png because of the same problem. Things will get better if you let them.
webp is a good format that's saddled with lousy adoption
i've been saying this and probably will be forever. so many people in the comments on this one complaining about not being able to use it for stuff and i have to resist the temptation to tell them to just..... get ffmpeg. it's not out of the question that some of these people even already have it in their path variable somewhere. it is not remotely difficult to use as long as you don't wanna customize the conversion settings, but i know that people are now and will forever remain allergic to the command line. no shade for that, there's plenty of things i avoid using because i just don't fuckin wanna. but i had many of the same annoyances for a long time and realizing i had access to a one-liner that you can literally do in the windows file explorer address bar without so much as opening a terminal window (though i usually do anyway just for tab-complete my beloved) just completely evaporated them. for the terminal-averse, one could probably devise a registry key to give the context menu an option to handle the conversion.....
or, if you're downloading it to edit, just hit "copy image" the same way you'd do with an image of literally any other format besides an animated gif. that's what you do, right, and then paste it into your image editor of choice, right? the majority of editors i use have a function upon making a new canvas to use the dimensions of the image in the clipboard, and might even paste the image right in for you. i try to avoid saving stuff that i don't actually intend to use again whenever possible, and it is annoying when my hand is forced (one day this will stop being a thing that annoys me about cohost)
i dunno about adoption ever getting much better than it is now especially since i'm not old enough to remember how true this ever was about pngs but it baffles me that i never see this ire directed toward apng, which i think is also neat, but has all the same issues at least as badly. but personally i dunno i don't blame, like, the MKV format for example for vegas pro still not supporting it? that seems like it would be daft of me
genuinely what is good about webp? it just seems to be a container you can put lossless or lossy in? what's the appeal, why should i switch
your mkv example is weird to me because mkv offers some useful extra shit to me the user over mp4 in how it can embed multiple tracks including subtitles in one file. what does webp offer me the user except inconvenience? i have ffmpeg and imagemagick in my windows path variable so i can use them in any folder but why should i have to, what purpose does webp serve? i never hear that even from its defenders, and let me tell you, "just go to slight extra effort because fandom wikis autoconvert all uploaded images to this new format" is not a compelling pitch to me in the absence of any information on why anyone would convert to webp
this is also why recent smartphones taking camera pics in HEIC weirds me out. like oh yeah it's like negligibly smaller in size? motherfucker any phone recent enough to be taking pics in HEIC has 64 gigs of internal memory bare-ass minimum, how the fuck can anyone on earth fill that up with JPEGs. i'd struggle to fill that with PNGs.
okay actually i guess i'd glossed over "back in the day people avoided png because of the same problem" which is even more ludicrous because back in the day I desperately wanted PNG to get wider support because it served a purpose in offering nicer quality than JPEGs in a SIGNIFICANTLY smaller size than BMP and with transparency. what features does webp offer????????? anyone????
Literally the only "adoption" problem PNG ever had back in the day was that Internet Explorer, while it displayed them, would display ones with alpha-translucency over an ugly 50% grey background no matter what. Every graphics program I ever used, circa 2000, supported it just fine. WebP is a format that exists because Google invented it, that offers no noticeable benefits over PNG, and punishes a website's page rank for not using it.
Learning that Fandom wikis auto-convert images to WebP format is just one of several shitty reasons why they get such high priority in search ranks and that the fan-run wikis get penalized so hard.
It's AVI that can also be used as an image container and, as Ticky notes, is being shoved down our throats by Google. Why this sucks ass should be obvious
the official replacement, built by the Joint Photographic Experts Group and which will be an ISO standard, is JPEG XL. It has tremendous advantages as an image format over JPEG, PNG, and webp. Chrome had experimental support for this but Google removed it from Chromium because they decided people wanted webp instead
being honest i was one of those very strange individuals who advocated for APNG back in the day, entirely on the basis that i could have non-dithered shadows in my animated avatars. y'know, back before the homogenisation of the web killed off the concept of transparency or animations in profile pictures. also it was just cool that there was more than just gif for a commonly-supported image format that could have multiple frames.
I still think APNG is cool, but completely get why it remained very niche.
I don't really know where i was going with this post but if google is trying to tell me i should like something, i am going to be vocally against that thing.
Lossy WebP is sorta a single keyframe of WebM (VP8) which actually has a reason to exist because the MPEG-LA is anal about H.264 licensing; they were even worse about that in the late 2000s when VP8 was first developed. Nobody liked Theora for some reason, so Google bought the copmany developing VP8 to help push web video.
