There's no doubt that JPEG is the web's go-to image format, offering
both widespread compatibility and small file sizes, but its compression
artifacts and an 8-bit limitation mean it's far from perfect.
Alternative image formats have been developed that provide
higher-quality compression, but nothing yet has come close to toppling
JPEG thanks to its ubiquity. BPG is the latest new format to challenge
it.
Created by Fabrice Bellard, a developer responsible for other open-source projects,
BPG stands for Better Portable Graphics and offers a number
of improvements over JPEG format. Most notably, BPG is based on the
HEVC/H.265 video compression standard. This is a major advantage over
other non-standard image formats, as H.265 will likely be supported by
hardware soon.
BPG's more efficient algorithm also supports up
to 14-bit files rather than JPEG's 8-bit only support. It also uses the
same means of chroma sub-sampling as JPEG, which is good for
transcoding. The format also features support for EXIF and other
metadata, as well as lossless compression. When comparing images of
roughly the same file size, BPG offers noticeably fewer artifacts than
JPEG (as well other more optimized formats like Google's WebP), as
demonstrated in this image comparison tool on GitHub.
These substantial improvements over JPEG make BPG an appealing
alternative, but for now ability to use the format is limited to use
with a JavaScript decoder.
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