New BPG image format could replace JPEG
Fabrice Bellard - creator of the QEMU virtualization hypervisor and FFMPEG multimedia libraries - claims his new format features better compression and smaller file sizes.
The new BPG file type - which stands for Better Portable Graphics - is based on HEVC open video compression standard. It features 14-bits per channel plus alpha transparency. In essence, the best aspects of JPEG and PNG combined. It also supports CMYK colour space, so it will work with print as well as Web-based images.
There are other file types out there such as Google's WebP, but BPG's developers claim much superior results to anything else currently on the market.
The great challenge of course is getting applications and operating systems to support the new file type in the first place. To help with adoption, Bellard has cleverly open-sourced the native code for Linux and Windows. As mobile browsing continues to grow, anything that brings web site file sizes down can only be a good!