BPG format can replace animated gif and not only

BPG (Better Portable Graphics) is a new graphic format, the purpose of which is to replace JPEG where quality or file size matter. This is exactly how BPG is created by the creator of this format, the ingenious programmer Fabrice Bellar , the author of such programs as LZEXE, FFmpeg, QEMU, etc.

Main benefits of BPG

• High compression ratio. Files are much smaller than JPEG with the same quality.
• Supported by most web browsers through a small Javascript decoder (56 KB in gzip).
• Based on a subset of the open standard video compression HEVC .
• Supports the same color formats as JPEG (grayscale, YCbCr 4: 2: 0, 4: 2: 2, 4: 4: 4) to reduce losses during conversion. Alpha channel supported. RGB, YCgCo and CMYK color spaces are also supported.
• Native support from 8 to 14 bits per channel for wider dynamic range.
• Lossless compression possible.
• Various metadata (such as EXIF , ICC, XMP profiles) can be embedded in a file.
• Animation support.

It is the last point that makes it possible to assume that BPG will replace the animated GIF on the Internet . In fact, it is better in all respects.

The following archive contains the source code for the bpgenc, bpgdec, and bpgview command line utilities (under Linux) and the corresponding libbpg library. There's also the source code of the Javascript decoder.

libbpg-0.9.6.tar.gz
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Binary for Windows (64 bit): bpg-0.9.6-win64.zip

The unofficial mirror of Github .

When compressing animations, BPG shows MP4 quality, while the files are smaller than the original MP4 files.

Here is an example of a video clip mp4 and bpg at 25 fps.

mp4, 927 KB
bpg, 518 KB ( on web page )

The video is practically no different in quality. GIF-animation of the same quality will have a size of 33.8 MB.

Obviously, GIF animation is outdated. Even Imgur, which is famous for hosting GIF animations, uses GIFV converter to convert GIF to normal WebM or MP4 video.

At the Bugzilla forum, dozens of participants voted to support BPG in the Firefox browser, but the developers have so far refrained from this, because the HEVC standard is not entirely patent clear.

For more details on the comparison of WebP and BPG, see the articles on Habré: 1 , 2 .