AVIF, WEBP, and me

That's right this is actually about me, the webmaster. Anyway after not really touching my site in like a year or something long and wild like that, I updated the gallery of screencaps of Starsky (and Hutch) to serve you .avif or .webp files (depending on what your browser supports, and also since webp is more widely supported than avif, any images which came out larger in .avif format are simply served in .webp format instead.)

The reason for this is pretty simple, this is the internet, bandwidth is a thing, and those formats are smaller. End of. I live in the mountains you know, the internet up here isn't great.

But nonetheless, there is a lot of dislike towards webp because everyone's pirated copy of Adobe Photoshop from *googles* 2012 doesn't support it (natively. there's a plugin as far as I'm aware. I just use imagemagick for this I'm going to be real with you) so I will also talk a bit about it.

Okay, that was a bit dismissive, but it is true that native webp support is becoming more common these days. My beloved paint tool sai, which I actually paid the 50 dollars for since I had the money and do truly enjoy using it, does not support it last time I checked (yes I have upgraded to 2, it allows me to paint fuckoff huge images), but krita does, photoshop does, GIMP does, and of course you can actually look at it in your system image viewer now. It's not in the state it was just a handful of years ago... well, I'm also using .avif files which are currently in that state of having very little support. If you want to download images I've posted as jpeg or png you can just force your browser to serve jpegs and pngs I think. Or change the url.

Anyway, I ran imagemagick a handful of times to try to get the best compression I could without losing too much fidelity. The original images were of course jpeg screenshots of dvd rips of a 70s tv show so you know. It is what it is. This image here though, for example:

The original jpeg is a already fairly small 45.13KB. In this year, that's not really anything too heavy for the vast majority of users. Indeed, it would be no big deal for me to leave it as is, but well... the avif version you see if you have an up to date browser and haven't forced this page to hide is 10.2KB. The webp is 11.57KB. This is just a neocities page that still isn't mobile optimized (I was working on it last time I updated, I swear) so in the grand scheme of things, the percentage reduction is impressive but the difference in bandwidth usage is a rounding error. Now, the transparent in the corner of a few pages got converted to webp in the middle of writing this and went from a whopping ~190KB to a little ~10KB which is more impressive.

And in my own defense I have but one thing to say: I just like it when files on the internet are compressed well. This is my page for putting whatever HTML bullshit I want online so that alone should be enough.