Pretty much every single one of us knows what a JPEG is these days, and statistically JPEG is one of the most popular image formats in the whole world – however a new format called BPG is looking to change that. BPG, which stands for Better Portable Graphics, is an alternative to the standard JPEG format, offering the exact same quality, but with a 50% decrease in file size.
Made by Fabrice Bellard, the French programmer behind Ffmpeg, QEMU, and the Tiny C Compiler, the new BPG format comes with a superior compression ratio allowing it to maintain the same quality as an original JPG yet with a significantly reduced file size.
Really BPG is not too different from JPEG and it even has the same chroma formats (grayscale, YCbCr 4:2:0, 4:2:2, 4:4:4), while also supporting an alpha channel, RGB, YCgCo and CMYK color spaces.
You won’t feel any difference if you replace JPEG with BPG, the developer guarantees, because metadata is also supported, so EXIF information can be added as well. Take a look at a comparison here and below.
In essence, BPG is based on a subset of the popular HEVC open video compression standard, which offers it a pretty significant advantage in terms of performance. Bellard pointed to a test conducted by Mozilla to explain that BPG files are loaded faster by browsers than JPEG.
Sadly as with most new formats – we’re probably months away from seeing BPG truly start to replace JPEG images. However the advantages are clearly there.