Make bttv emotes render as webps, like 7tv emotes

[thisisthetwotime]

Since around last year or so, bttv has switched to using .webp files for emotes, following 7tv's steps. However, chatterino is still using .gifs to render emotes in chat. It is now outdated, and actually reduces the quality of some of the emotes in chat, for example due to them having semi-transparent elements which are not supported in the .gif format. Shown in the example below, how an emote looks in chat, and how it looks like when you click "Open", and either the direct link or an emote link on bttv.

I would like to suggest for chatterino to use the same treatment for bttv emotes as 7tv emotes, since they are already implemented as .webps.

[Nerixyz]

BTTV doesn't really document when WEBP is available. I opened night/betterttv#7313 to resolve that.

[Mm2PL]

bleh webp, can we collectively forget this format exists?

[JunkiEDM]

Maybe still render it as gif if it was uploaded before BTTV started allowing webp uploads so you don't get quality loss from conversion? It would be nice if the bttv api had a way to tell which format an emote was uploaded in and render that version

[Nerixyz]

There's no such field. You'd have to ask that in the BTTV repo.

[brian6932]

There's no quality loss, BTTV uses lossless webp (VP8L) with RGB(A) colorspaces. 7TV does this for static encodes at the moment, but no longer for animated encodes (FFZ too), which's why you experience the quality loss, it does chroma subsampling to go from RGB(A)➜YUV(A)420P. More info here SevenTV/SevenTV#153. You'll experience less quality loss, by choosing 7TV's avif encodes, instead of webp ones, they're still set to lossy (7TV's using Auto), but due to the larger colorspace (YUV(A)444P), and more efficient compression, they do look better.

[JunkiEDM]

@brian6932 Oh thanks for the info, in that case it should be fine to use webp, assuming they keep using lossless and don't switch to lossy at some point in the future. Lossy webp is just pretty terrible and especially noticeable on some grayscale 7tv emotes, but since 7tv has avif and Chatterino uses that it's not really an issue.

[brian6932]

since 7tv has avif and Chatterino uses that it's not really an issue.

chatterino7 uses avif encodes, chatterino2 uses webp, fwiw 7TV only made these changes in their v3.5 rust rewrite, so some of the older v3 webp emotes look good (the ancient v2 uploaded encodes will look even worse, as the v2 7TV image-processor was entirely lossy for a while, when they swapped from gif to webp). It'd be good for chatterino2 to move to avif as well for animated emotes, but not static ones (png and/or webp encodes are set to true lossless as static), most difficult part's just dealing with additional build complexity.

[pajlada]

@Nerixyz made a PR making BetterTTV static & animated emotes use the WebP format in #5957 - it has since been merged in and is available in our development builds.
Thanks for reaching out