Thread 8334

Are there any particular issues preventing a whitelist of the VP9 video codec and the OPUS audio codec for WEBM, alongside the existing VP8 and Vorbis?
It currently has support in all major operating systems and browsers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP9#Operating_system_support

Seems like a good way to bump the quality of webm uploads without increasing the filesize limit.

Not OP, but on the subject of .webms, I want to ask another question. Has the possibility of enabling sound on other boards besides /gif/ and /wsg/ been considered?

Now, I can see the possibility for abuse, for sure, but even regular images and .gifs can be abused in their own way, and there's rules to handle certain kinds of abuse of those already.

>>8334 (OP)
there are too many potential exploits
>>8335
not a good idea. doing this would fundamentally change the nature of 4chan. right now i can browse without headphones just fine, and it doesn't impact the experience at all. adding sound to other boards would basically require you to be wearing headphones or else you'll miss out. that's not really 4chan at that point. there are plenty of other websites which allow for sound in their images, and if you really need sound, you can use an external link, or else post to /gif/ or /wsg/ and crosslink it

>>8336
The virgin crosslinker vs the Chad Soundposter.

I don't mean to hijack the thread, but
Are there any plans to add WebP support? I feel as though it's becoming more and more common.
Same question for Mp4. It's more or less the de facto standard for video sharing on Discord, and that's where a lot of today's video content is being shared and distributed.

>>8336
>adding sound to other boards would basically require you to be wearing headphones or else you'll miss out
Uh, but .webms on /gif/ and /wsg/ play sound fine without headphones??

>>8338
I have yet to see a single .webp file on Discord in all my years using it. I only ever actually see this file format on Wikias and some odd corners.

>>8339
I think the point that's being made is that you don't have to mute your PC to browse on other boards. When you're on /gif/ and /wsg/ you're basically looking through videos and have the expectation that sound will start blaring through your PC, while on the other boards this is not the case.

>>8341
They're mute by default for me. Maybe a little loudspeaker icon could be layered over the thumbnail to indicate that the .webm has an audio track?

>>8342
the point is that it would be annoying to be "forced" to listen to audio in order to participate fully in a thread

>>8340
I see them quite often embedded in websites.

>>8338
WebP, while technically more efficient than other formats, is absolute shit and is only used by some websites to prevent people from stealing their NFTs through search engine results by instead forcing them to save an image format that's utterly fucking useless to the point it can't even be previewed by your bog standard Windows file manager. We should absolutely not support it and neither should anything or anyone.

>>8345
So it's more efficient, yet is absolutely terrible just because Windows lacks native support? I'm failing to see what the problem is.
It wasn't that long ago when Windows couldn't handle WebMs either. Hell it still might not be able to. Feels like it just lacks proper adoption at this point.

>>8346
Windows doesn't support it natively and neither do a lot of image editing programs. It also doesn't have wide spread adoption even within web design because WebP only serves two purposes: gatekeep 99% of users who can't open images from your website after saving them or thumbnails.
PNG is still higher quality than WebP despite being 26% bigger so it's really only a competitor to to JPG (which isn't saying much), even against JPEG the compression is marginally better in comparison but it does produce better looking images (but if you wanted better looking images you could just use PNG). This is why a lot of websites use PNG "despite" WebP being the "better" choice (it isn't since file size is only a consideration of many and file formats almost always end up being used for niche reasons outside of those that are clearly better in their respective categories or old enough that every normie uses it despite not knowing anything about it).
You'd be better off arguing for why we should adopt AVIF since it has better compression than WebP and also produces better looking images than it. That WebP never got mass adoption isn't exactly surprising since it was spear headed by Google and if anything it was developed to solve Google's storage problem in regards to thumbnails on their services (and literally every other big tech company developed their own cancerous file formats for their own ends and needs with no attempt at setting an industry wide standard) but outside of running big data companies where you would incur ridiculous monetary losses for storing unnecessary extra bits of what are meant to be low res images there's no real reason to adopt it especially on a website like 4chan since neither is it actually used by ordinary people nor do we need it for the images we permanently host on our website.

>>8346
NTA, but I also share the opinion that webp is not yet at a stage of adoption where it's worthwhile to post them on 4chan. Imagine a thread on /w/ where all the images are webp. You download a wallpaper you can't use. Maybe you have to go through a few hoops by finding a website that processes images from webp to another format. Maybe you find a Photoshop plugin that lets you convert it to another format. Since compatibility/adoption hasn't reached the level of "built-in, everybody has this", it just seems to me that it would cause more frustration to the end user than anything. Once adoption raises to that level where "it just works" in most applications, I would say personally that would be a good time for 4ch to adopt it.

>>8336
Ah, ok then.
>>8338
h264 and vp8 are in the same ballpark of quality, though vp8 has less encoding options to optimize low-bitrate output. Not that a lot of people use those when encoding.
I was mainly suggesting VP9/Opus since they are more efficient than h264/AAC , and it wouldn't require implementing another container format to check since there's already a check for streams in WEBM containers.

>>8345
Agree fully.

>>8346
>Feels like it just lacks proper adoption at this point.
That's a huge deal though, it means it lacks support for the majority of computer users. Phonefags, Linuxfags, and Applefags, they're all secondary.
I think millions of users are gonna be pissed as hell when they save images like normal and then notice later it's some weird nonstandard format they've never heard of before, which their computer doesn't recognize.

What are the actual benefits of .webp format images? What is it that makes them so worthwhile that it'll make it worth sidelining more than half of the userbase?

Also some context for the thread:
https://blog.4chan.org/post/81896300203/webm-support-on-4chan

>>8351
>What are the actual benefits of .webp format images?
>What is it that makes them so worthwhile that it'll make it worth sidelining more than half of the userbase?
Yup, two entirely different answers really.
Like others said, the benefits of webp in their current are primarily for mass-conversion and long-term costs associated with hosting, which are two things that futaba-style imageboards aren't designed around. Up until the point that it would have mass adoption over already supported formats, there isn't really a need for it here at all.
Though I guess in the same way there isn't strictly a need for VP9/OPUS over VP8/OGG either. But VP9/OPUS is also just a straight upgrade unless you want to make a webm with transparency or something very particular.

>>8336
>or else you'll miss out
Whatever portion of our iOS mobile users can't view webms at all, and nobody seems to get left out there. if we really cared about making sure nobody is missing out on content, we'd support a multiplatform format like mp4 :^) we have two boards that are completely unusable for a portion of our mobile users.
Soundless webm are an ideological holdover from when google man was running the site.

>>8360
NO .WEBM .GIF ONLY KTHNXBAI

>>8360
I think it would be nice to embed something like https://github.com/brion/ogv.js/ at least for iOS users so that they could watch stuff on the site without having to punt it into VLC or something.

>>8346
>So it's more efficient, yet is absolutely terrible just because Windows lacks native support?

>>8360
Those people deserve it for using iPhones, or hell, being phoneposters.

>>8336
I disagree. Certain boards would benefit from sound webms enabled. /a/ in particular might have no need for the catbox sound extension if we just gave them what they want to begin with. There is clearly a niche for /a/ sound webms, and it is already being filled as we speak but without the safety and control official support can provide.

Also, I think you're seeing this as a "well if we have to do one board we have to do them all" problem. Should we have sound webms on /pol/ for example? Absolutely not. But /a/, /co/, /v/, /tv/, and especially /mu/? Absolutely.

>>8380
Can we add /o/ and /m/ too? /o/ frequently has engine sounds etc threads, and /m/ is, well another anime board.

>>8447
You could probably make a short list for boards that would benefit, and another list for boards that should be barred from it.

>>8360
You can browse and watch WEBMs if you sideload a 4chan app on iPhone. I use Altserver + iChan, don't need to jailbreak either

>>8360
>>8566
iphone user here
There's literally a VLC app you can use to watch webm's. It is a complete non-issue. More of an annoyance.

>>8373
Thank you dev-sama <3

So yeah, VP9+OPUS has been added.
Okie Dokie then.

>>8572
Luv me copystrikes.