We need webp NOW

[Everade]

Why are invisioncommunity devs so blind for webp?

It's not like it requires any other extra work, since the compression of webp is already existant by nature.
Simply allowing webp by default shouldn't be the biggest deal, or is it?

It's already widely accepted by all major browsers, so there's no excuse on that anymore, especially not since you dropped IE support yourselfs.
But still, every request and any conversation about webp have either been put down, or ignored.

Could we please get an explanation why you're so anti-fast-web?
I'm honestly wondering why is that.

 

I'm also wondering if the spacer.png image load implementation is still best practice either.
Wouldn't it make more sense to add native lazy loading instead?

Really keen to live up to todays SEO standards and performance requirements.

[opentype]

17 minutes ago, Everade said:

Simply allowing webp by default shouldn't be the biggest deal, or is it?

I haven’t researched that in detail, but I believe one problem is that images are processed on the server (e.g. to create thumbnails) and that requires server-side support, which there is no guarantee of at this time of for the majority of IPS customers. 

Edited September 28, 2020 by opentype

[Runar]

4 hours ago, Everade said:

It's already widely accepted by all major browsers

81 % according to Can I use: https://caniuse.com/webp

4 hours ago, Everade said:

Wouldn't it make more sense to add native lazy loading instead?

74 % according to Can I use: https://caniuse.com/loading-lazy-attr

4 hours ago, Everade said:

Simply allowing webp by default shouldn't be the biggest deal, or is it?

What do you mean by "allowing webp"? Are you unable to post WebP images on your community? Earlier I used the PageSpeed nginx module, and this module delivered images in the WebP format if supported by the browser, and this worked (for the most part).

If you mean "automatically converting JPG and PNG images to WebP", then yes, this is not possible and neither something the forum software should do. This should be done by your web server or other software.

Edited September 28, 2020 by Runar

[AlexWebsites]

I'm doing it server side with mod_pagespeed. There is no native image conversion in IPS. 

[Runar]

23 minutes ago, AlexWebsites said:

I'm doing it server side with mod_pagespeed. There is no native image conversion in IPS. 

What's your experience so far? I had to disable it, because when my members quoted posts with images converted to WebP, the images in the new posts were hard coded WebP and did not show up in unsupported browsers.

[Everade]

47 minutes ago, Runar said:

What do you mean by "allowing webp"? Are you unable to post WebP images on your community?

Exactly, uploading webp as an image simply isn't handled as such.

Back in the days with IPB3, we were able to easily define custom file support for uploads.
From what i can tell, IPB4 doesn't even give you that option anymore?!

webp should be clearly added at least as an option for image upload.

Of course there are other implementation options like profile pictures, thumbnail compression and so on.
That would be amazing of course, but we're simply lacking the very basics already.

As of today, IPB simply fully ignores the  most likely best lossless and lossy image type in existence.
And people have been asking for it for years.

[bfarber]

What things are you looking for support for specifically? Are you just meaning to display webp images as images, instead of attachments?

Obviously this is something we can look into too, but if you have a list of areas/problems specifically it might be a good starting point.

(For the record, recent releases of GD do support webp, as does ImageMagick, so server-side technology is not a hindrance)

[AlexWebsites]

1 hour ago, Runar said:

What's your experience so far? I had to disable it, because when my members quoted posts with images converted to WebP, the images in the new posts were hard coded WebP and did not show up in unsupported browsers.

I don't really monitor it, it was a set and forget. I haven't had any issues on any of my sites that I'm aware of. The output for an image posted within a topic is like so:

www.mysite.com/uploads/monthly_2020_09/userimage.thumb.JPG.1shdhodikowhdklshklshkldyhsklh.JPG.pagespeed.ic.JHgdgioddd.webp

[Everade]

1 hour ago, bfarber said:

What things are you looking for support for specifically? Are you just meaning to display webp images as images, instead of attachments?

1.) Display webp as image instead of attachment (handle them just like all other image types)
2.) Allow webp as image upload option in all areas (Profile Picture, Cover Photo, Forum Icon, Grid Card Image, Pages when posting content and anywhere else that i've missed)

 

Repeat the steps for .WEBM (would be lovely since video compression is in most cases superior to animated images such as GIF and WEBP)
Would be really great to be able to be able to upload video format types in all the mentioned areas (Profile Pictures, Cover Photo, but especialy Pages)

 

3.) Add an option to swap all png images (profile content and/or uploads and forum core pictures) to webp instead with a conversion job that processes all images. (That's the bigger work i guess, but would be amazing to have.)
This would ultimately reduce the data usage by tremendous bounds, save bandwith and improve performance.

 

[Everade]

Regarding WEBM and MP4:
https://web.dev/replace-gifs-with-videos/

It's so much better than gif, would be amazing to have support for these.

[Runar]

1 hour ago, AlexWebsites said:

I don't really monitor it, it was a set and forget. I haven't had any issues on any of my sites that I'm aware of. The output for an image posted within a topic is like so:

www.mysite.com/uploads/monthly_2020_09/userimage.thumb.JPG.1shdhodikowhdklshklshkldyhsklh.JPG.pagespeed.ic.JHgdgioddd.webp

Exactly, and if that URL is quoted the image is not viewable for anyone using Safari (which is more than 15% of browsers according to Can I use). I never found a way to prevent the  PageSpeed processed image URLs from being stored in the database, so I disabled PageSpeed completely.

[bfarber]

It is recommended to output webp files in a <picture> tag instead of an <img> tag, which supports specifying multiple versions. That's something we'd have to take into account.

Also, ios14 added support apparently: https://css-tricks.com/webp-image-support-coming-to-ios-14/

I found that we have an open internal suggestion discussing this already so I've updated it. Thanks!

[Everade]

Thanks for hearing me out, appreciate it.

Hope next to webp ,both webm +mp4 is being considered for "image" uploads in form of faking GIFs as well!

Please note that:
Twitter and Co. are faking GIFs as looping MP4 or WEBP videos since quite a while.
Video format compressions are simply superior in any way. And a user can't tell the difference.

Here's an example of a twitter post which has been uploaded as a GIF and shows as such in the bottom left corner.

 

And here's the actual source as a mp4:
https://video.twimg.com/tweet_video/EjB_QLaXYAEvrOB.mp4

 

 

If a webp or mp4 video is being uploaded within your image upload sections.
You could simply detect the file format and then use the looping video tag accordingly:
 

<video autoplay loop muted playsinline>
  <source src="fakegif.webm" type="video/webm">
  <source src="fakegif.mp4" type="video/mp4">
</video>

 

Just like the <picture> tag you've mentioned, it offers fallback options if needed.

Another option would be to convert gifs into webm and so forth...

 

Hope it helps 😉

[bfarber]

We already output videos inline if the browser/device supports the format. Thus if you upload an MP4 and your browser can play that MP4 (dependent on codecs, etc.) it should embed.

Transcoding video formats and doing things like converting animated gifs to MP4s is a bit of a different ballgame from adding webp support.

[Everade]

4 hours ago, bfarber said:

We already output videos inline if the browser/device supports the format.

Yes, absolutely. Directly linking it within the editor works just fine, just like with webp.
Also uploading into the editor works just fine, that's great.

But you're missing out that we can not upload it as an "image".

How about webm as:
- Profile picture
- Bug Report "image" upload on your custom PAGES
- Cover Photo
- Forum Icon
- Grid Card Image

That's what you get:

 

 

What i'm asking for is, enabling mp4, webm uploads in all IMAGE locations and simply generate fake GIFs using:
Just like Twitter, Giphy, Instagram and all the other big players do.

<video autoplay loop muted playsinline>
  <source src="fakegif.webm" type="video/webm">
</video>

 

[bfarber]

Ok, well allowing videos where we currently allow images is secondary to supporting webp. We're talking about two different things at that point - not that it's a bad suggestion or anything, but I was focusing first on where you wanted to see webp support implemented so we can break this down into workable chunks. 🙂 

[imarc]

On 9/29/2020 at 8:44 AM, bfarber said:

We already output videos inline if the browser/device supports the format. Thus if you upload an MP4 and your browser can play that MP4 (dependent on codecs, etc.) it should embed.

Transcoding video formats and doing things like converting animated gifs to MP4s is a bit of a different ballgame from adding webp support.

So this feature only works if a user uploads an attachment?

My users are used to using imgur for hosting. 

How can they post a gifv or mp4 if it's not uploaded?

Example:

https://i.imgur.com/FY1AbSo.mp4
https://i.imgur.com/FY1AbSo.gifv

[bfarber]

You may be able to install a CKEditor plugin to allow embedding of remote videos. Additionally, some services support embedding of videos (think youtube, vimeo, etc.).

For randomly linked videos, we wouldn't just automatically embed it.

[Runar]

21 hours ago, imarc said:

How can they post a gifv or mp4 if it's not uploaded?

I'll make you a plugin to automatically embed Imgur content. Give me a few hours and I'll message you!

Edited October 1, 2020 by Runar

[Everade]

On 9/29/2020 at 9:52 PM, bfarber said:

Ok, well allowing videos where we currently allow images is secondary to supporting webp. We're talking about two different things at that point - not that it's a bad suggestion or anything, but I was focusing first on where you wanted to see webp support implemented so we can break this down into workable chunks. 🙂 

It wouldn't really consider it being 2 things.
Since webp, webm and mp4 (and anything else you may want to add) would all need to be added at the exact same spots.

Yes webm and mp4 would require seperate handling, but the "locations" you've been asking for are all at the same spot.

So you would save time by implementing them both together eventualy 😉

In any case, looking forward to any of it.
Cheers.

[bfarber]

Eh...not really. At the software level we can largely add support for webp by adjusting one line of code in a central library.

	/**
	 * @brief	Image Extensions
	 */
	public static $imageExtensions = array( 'gif', 'jpeg', 'jpe', 'jpg', 'png' );

Adding video support to areas like cover photos and profile pictures requires going through those form helpers, tagging which file extensions are allowed, then adjusting the HTML output to be conditional on the top of file (i.e. <img> tag for pictures and <video> tag for videos, although the reality is we use background-image for cover photos so it's not even quite that simple).

It's two separate requests, trust me. 😉 That isn't to discount either suggestion either.

[aia]

I wonder why image extensions are hardcoded instead of option in ACP? It would be great to have this as an option, so everyone who cares about modern image formats could add them there without any code.

[Rhett]

22 minutes ago, Mr 13 said:

I wonder why image extensions are hardcoded instead of option in ACP? It would be great to have this as an option, so everyone who cares about modern image formats could add them there without any code.

Because, as with most things, there is much more to the picture that users don't see or understand, we have to ensure image processing software can handle these extensions, and often case build in support for them. It's not as simple as saying allow xwz etc. 

 

 

[Makoto]

My stance is if you want WebP support, just use a good CDN service like CloudFlare.

It's a much more sensible solution. CloudFlare converts images to WebP, optionally performing only lossless or lossy compression, ensures WebP images are only served to clients that support it, and requires absolutely no additional processing power or storage on your end.

The same can be done with other reputable CDN services I believe.

If you are bare metal and absolutely don't want to use Cloudflare or so on, there is also mod_pagespeed as mentioned above.

Edited October 3, 2020 by Makoto

[sobrenome]

And now we have AVIF!

https://blog.cloudflare.com/generate-avif-images-with-image-resizing/