Halide Compression

Maturity is hard to define, but we believe Iris-WebP qualifies: it turned one year old in May. SVT-AV1 and libaom also qualify, and certainly libwebp and libjpeg. Over that year, our workflow has had to adapt to the encoder's growing capabilities. As we w

Why? At the end of last year, we discovered the well-designed ColorVideoVDP metric, but found the reference Python implementation was not fast enough for our use case, increasing our Iris benchmark script's runtime dramatically. This wasn'...

In developing our proprietary encoder Iris for WebP, our aim with public and private testing is to properly demonstrate the value of the encoder compared to alternatives. Cheating benchmarks, overfitting for metrics, or unfairly testing other encoders doe

Why? The aphorism "all models are wrong, but some are useful" is commonly attributed to George E. P. Box, a British statistician. The concept is especially relevant in multimedia compression where we have lots of models to choose from for evaluating lossy

What Is Consistency? Consistency could mean a number of things in the context of image compression, but the specific definition of consistency used in this blog post measures how closely an image encoder's user-configurable quality index matches a percept

Who are you? I'm Julio Barba, a developer who works on video and image compression technology, focusing on the AV1 format and its successor, AV2. I started in backend development but pivoted to multimedia compression in 2023 by contributing to popular ope

AVIF is a complex image format with a lot of potential. A significant amount of this potential was unlocked in 2024; Gianni Rosato, our founder and contributor to these efforts, details how this was done & talks about the future of modern image codecs on

Introduction AVIF (AV1 Image File Format) is growing in popularity for web images, thanks to its impressive compression and quality. However, open-source AVIF encoders struggled with consistency, usability, and overall compression efficiency for ...

Why WebP? WebP was introduced in 2010 with the goal of providing better compression for Web images. While it claimed to offer significant efficiency advantages over JPEG, in practice this wasn't always true. Its adoption was also slow due to an initial la