The Squeeze

I've been adding a lot of content to ScooterBoy over the past week, and it's been causing some problems.

In particular, the size of the archive had grown to over 100MB.

Increasingly, I've come to realize that speed of iteration is one of the biggest factors in determining overall project success.

The large archive size was causing slow sync times with the tablet, and even longer upload times on my rural broadband connection.

Something had to be done.

Enter WebP

WebP is a relatively new graphics format (2010), published by Google, both patent-free and open-source.

It's like a super-JPEG and a super-PNG all rolled in to one. Oh, and it fully supports alpha!

Here's one I prepared earlier: (click through for full size images)

Original PNG, 540KB

WebP version, 23KB

(WebP version as lossless PNG, for comparison only)

In this particular example, that's a whopping 95.7% saving in space!!

Obviously results will vary, but I'm consistently seeing 75% - 90% save spacing over the equivalent PNG/JPG, for a reasonable reduction in quality for tablet devices.

I'm also finding that the compression artifacts are of a type that is less annoying than PNG or JPEG. (Apart from some YUV color noise at very low bitrates - hopefully google will fix this in an update)

And it was super easy to integrate into my codebase.

Want even more info? Go grab the source over at developers.google.com


And my archive size? Now down to a very manageable 22MB.