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lifthrasiirtoday at 7:54 AM2 repliesview on HN

It is not that trivial, because there are tons of existing JPEG files and lossy recompression costs quality. (PNG does get replaced primarily because lossless WebP is kinda a superset of what PNG internally does.)


Replies

kricktoday at 8:58 AM

On your last point: I find it super annoying when both lossy and lossless codecs have the same name, and, more importantly, file extension. I get it that internally they are "almost the same thing", just with one extra step of discarding low-impact values, but when I see a PNG/FLAC file I know, that if the file was handled properly and wasn't produced by Windows clipboard or something, it is supposed to represent exactly the original data. When I see JPEG/MP3, I know that whatever it went through, it is not the original data for sure. When I see WEBP, I assume it's lossy, because it's just how it's used, and I cannot just convert all my PNG files to a newer format, because after that I won't be able to tell (easily) which is the original and which is not.

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Zardoz84today at 8:43 AM

Just re-encode it to Jpeg XL without loss of quality, and use less space.