Better Portable Graphics
Better Portable Graphics (BPG) is a file format for coding digital images, which was created by programmer Fabrice Bellard in 2014. He has proposed it as a replacement for the JPEG image format as the more compression-efficient alternative in terms of image quality or file size. It is based on the intra-frame encoding of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) video compression standard. Tests on photographic images in July 2014 found that BPG produced smaller files for a given quality than JPEG, JPEG XR and WebP.
| Filename extension |
.bpg |
|---|---|
| Internet media type | image/bpg, image/x-bpg |
| Magic number | 42 50 47 fb |
| Initial release | 2014 |
| Latest release | 0.9.8 21 April 2018 |
| Type of format | lossy/lossless bitmap image format |
| Extended from | HEVC |
| Open format? | Yes |
| Website | bellard |
The format has been designed to be portable and work in low memory environments, and used in portable handheld and IoT devices, where those properties are particularly important. Current research works on designing and developing more energy-efficient BPG hardware which can then be integrated in portable devices such as digital cameras.
While there is no built-in native support for BPG in any mainstream browsers, websites can still deliver BPG images to all browsers by including a JavaScript library written by Bellard. Others followed Bellards idea and created the AVIF image format based on the AV1 video codec, which is patent free and therefore got implemented in browsers.