Articles | Fuck Webp

This shit is gross. It's a chroma subsampled jpeg peddled by Google because the company whom is pushing webassembly onto the last few unsuspecting boomers still using chrome needs more reasons to shit up a perfectly functional internet with more asinine formats that degrade the quality of content for no benefit other than to sound hip and trendy. The worst part is a lot of websites, like those yandex image search tend to cough up, auto convert to webp and it's absolutely disgusting what they do to my son.

png (118kb), default jpeg (106kb), jpeg using mjpeg codec (45kb), webp (41kb)

Gross! You lose colors, you lose definition, you lose DK's entire goddamn neck tie, all to save a measily 4kb. Jesus Christ.

png (5408kb), default jpeg (3876kb), jpeg using mjpeg codec (1084kb), webp (1471kb)

Webp is even worse in a high detail image where it bloats out of control in size while destroying image information. It literally offers no benefit over jpeg whatsoever while being even larger in many cases. Why are people using this trash, again? Oh yeah, because Google claims it will help the internet be faster! Except... images haven't been the leading cost of bandwidth for years, the average website loads a half-dozen or more individual javascripts, and chat applications using 2gb+ of ram is considered normal in 2020. Yikes! We sure as fuck didn't need yet another useless format entering circulation that the uneducated adopt because of middleware. Sadly, just like mp3 and Justin Trudeau it will probably linger for an uncomfortably long time despite having outlived any comedic value decades ago. I dream for the day Google is held accountable for this kind of behavior.

How can I quickly get rid of this manure from my extracirricular study material so I can open it in regular image editors like xnview?

Sometimes you don't have a choice about the content you're lifting and reposting elsewhere for mematic purposes and you need a way to convert from this glorified MIT paperweight to God's Chosen Format. You can't reclaim the data destroyed by webp and the lies it feeds you about uncompressed encoding, but you can batch convert the files so you don't need to play the russian roulette of finding a program that can actually open the stupid things.

Placing this bat script, courtesy of (ex)drunken Swedishmen, in your windows sendto folder will allow you to purge entire directories of the neckbeard menace and hand you pngs in return. Simply edit the directories to point to your ffmpeg installation as necessary. If you want to preserve the webp files for your museum of failed inventions and marketing scams, like the dvd rewinder, you can delete everything before the end bracket on the last line.