Why BPG will replace GIFs and not only.

https://eek.ro/why-bpg-will-replace-gifs-and-not-only/


Advantages?
  • Animation support. You can have a GIF half the size of an MP4.
  • Video inline play (but without sound). One of the biggest problems is that on Mobile Safari no video can be played inline. GIFs solve, and when we have GIFs that are 5% the size of the original, that’s epic!
  • High compression ratio. Smaller than a JPG and even smaller than Google’s WebP with similar quality if not better.
  • You can start using today with a Javascript decoder (gzipped size: 56 KB).
  • And plenty other.

GIFs today are not even GIFs anymore. With the release of Imgur’s gifv the internet went nuts for nothing more than a mp4 that has autoplay, and if mp4’s are not supported, or autoplay is disabled (mobiles), they’re replaced with very low quality GIFs.

Downsides?

We got just a few…

  • Decompiling time! - Current example is around 8-10s (the bigger the file, the slower the decompiling)… This would be easily solved if browsers would add native support.
  • Main thread blocking while decompiling large files.
  • No sound support (but who cares, this is image encoding, we’re not talking better video formats).