Did you ever hear the tragedy of WebP The Efficient? I thought not. It’s not a story the GIF gang would tell you. It’s an image legend.

WebP was a new format of pictures, so efficient and so lightweight, it could use modern compression to influence the web pages to actually load faster…

It had such a knowledge of the user’s needs that it could even keep transparency and animations from dying.

The power of modern computing is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.

It became so widespread… The only thing we had to be afraid of, was people insisting on using formats from the 90’s, which eventually, of course, they did.

Unfortunately, we didn’t teach the noobs everything we knew about compression, then the noobs killed the format by converting it to PNG and sharing that.

Ironic. We could save the web from being too slow, but not from the users.

  • Jase@lemmy.worldEnglish
    141·
    1 year ago

    Dude, it’s not just OBS. I’m not a streamer. Most things do not play nicely with webp.

    I am a DM and I’m constantly downloading artwork to make tokens or maps to slightly tweak to fit my purposes. Webp is the bane of my existence because no one supports it. The image viewer I use doesn’t support it. The file thumbnail gets stuck as a white square. The token maker website doesn’t support it and the program I have claims to support it but won’t load in the image. The moving webps are supposedly supported by a VTT I was considering but again they just never loaded properly or loaded as a still image. I recall sending a webp on discord and instead of displaying the image inline it just showed it as an attachment.

    I don’t care about file extensions. I’ve never had an opinion over which one is my favorite. Do I like png or jpeg? Don’t care. But I hate webp because so far it has been functionally worthless to me be cause seemingly no one supports it.

    Sure. Might be better quality. Might be tiny and amazing. Might be hyper efficient. But if I can’t use it after I save it, or that I have to jump through hoops to use it, then he fucks the point?

    • Mossy Feathers (She/They)@pawb.socialEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Sorry, I think I might have come off as condescending when I didn’t mean to. I was just trying to say that the only people I’ve seen have issues with it were streamers. I failed to connect that with the fact that streamers can have a large audience; and that their viewers are typically people who are technologically savvy enough to be “tech support” for their friends and family, but not savvy enough to know that webp is technically a superior, albiet undersupported, format. As such, a negative view of webp spreads faster than a positive one, potentially impacting adoption.

      I also didn’t mean to invalidate your experiences, I simply haven’t had anyone to play DnD in a while. I’ve also never tried to DM, so I hadn’t run into the issues that you’re having.

    • preciousjewel128@lemmy.worldEnglish
      42·
      1 year ago

      I’m also a DM. I use foundry, which does support webp files. I can store literally 1000s of images for a fraction of space, and use that extra space for extra modules and even more content for my players.