BPG

Revision as of 14:18, 15 December 2014

BPG (Better Portable Graphics) is a compressed raster graphic format intended to have better quality with smaller file sizes than JPEG. Its compression is based on HEVC, a compression format designed for videos (which may be patent-encumbered in some countries, but which is now being often supported directly by hardware, so if that feature is used instead of separate software it might not require separate licensing). As this format is not natively supported by current browsers, the recommended method of using them in the Web is to include a JavaScript loader which converts the references to BPG graphics (in normal IMG tags in HTML) to embedded "data" URLs containing the graphic data converted to a PNG graphic.

image/bpg has been suggested as the MIME type for BPG, but no MIME type is formally registered.

Identification

BPG files start with the following 4-byte magic pattern: 42 50 47 fb.

Specs

• BPG Specification

Sample files

• Comparison with JPEG (actual BPG files: lena_q36.bpg, lena_q32.bpg, lena_q28.bpg, lena_q23.bpg)
• Wikipedia pictures (actual BPG files: 003.bpg,005.bpg)
• Images with alpha channel (actual BPG files: 2.bpg,2small.bpg, 3.bpg, 5.bpg)

Links

• Official site
• Some discussion
• Identification of BPG format
• Online demonstrator- shows quality differences between similarly-sized images in JPEG, JP2, WebP and BPG formats