zenwebp

Pure Rust WebP encoding and decoding. No C dependencies, no unsafe code.

Getting Started

Add to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
zenwebp = "0.2"

Decode a WebP image

use zenwebp::WebPDecoder;

let webp_bytes: &[u8] = /* your WebP data */;
let mut decoder = WebPDecoder::new(webp_bytes)?;
let (width, height) = decoder.dimensions();

// Decode to RGBA
let mut rgba = vec![0u8; decoder.output_buffer_size().unwrap()];
decoder.read_image(&mut rgba)?;

Encode to WebP

use zenwebp::{WebPEncoder, EncoderParams, ColorType};

let rgb_pixels: &[u8] = /* your RGB data */;
let (width, height) = (800, 600);

// Lossy encoding at quality 75
let mut webp_output = Vec::new();
let mut encoder = WebPEncoder::new(&mut webp_output);
encoder.set_params(EncoderParams::lossy(75));
encoder.encode(rgb_pixels, width, height, ColorType::Rgb8)?;

Features

• Pure Rust - no C dependencies, builds anywhere Rust does
• #![forbid(unsafe_code)] - memory safety guaranteed
• no_std compatible - works with just alloc, no standard library needed
• SIMD accelerated - SSE2/SSE4.1/AVX2 on x86, SIMD128 on WASM
• Full format support - lossy, lossless, alpha, animation (decode), ICC/EXIF/XMP metadata

Safe SIMD

We achieve both safety and performance through safe abstractions over CPU intrinsics:

• wide - portable SIMD types that autovectorize well
• archmage and magetypes - token-gated safe intrinsics
• safe_unaligned_simd - safe unaligned load/store
• core::arch - newly stabilized as safe in Rust

These abstractions may not be perfect, but we trust them over hand-rolled unsafe code.

Decoder

Supports all WebP features: lossy and lossless compression, alpha channel, animation, and extended format with ICC/EXIF/XMP chunks.

Encoder

Supports lossy and lossless encoding with configurable quality (0-100) and speed/quality tradeoff (method 0-6).

// Lossless encoding
encoder.set_params(EncoderParams::lossless());

// Fast lossy encoding (larger files)
encoder.set_params(EncoderParams::lossy(75).method(0));

// High quality lossy (slower, smaller files)
encoder.set_params(EncoderParams::lossy(75).method(6));

Performance

Benchmarks on a 768x512 image (Kodak test suite):

*libwebp method 6 with trellis, comparable quality settings

Quality

At the same quality setting, zenwebp produces files within 1-5% of libwebp's size with comparable visual quality. Quality is slightly better than libwebp below Q75 and slightly worse above Q75.

no_std Support

[dependencies]
zenwebp = { version = "0.2", default-features = false }

Both encoder and decoder work without std. The decoder takes &[u8] slices and the encoder writes to Vec<u8>. Only encode_to_writer() requires the std feature.

Origin

Forked from image-webp with significant enhancements:

• Lossy encoder (original only supported lossless)
• ~2x faster decoding through SIMD and algorithmic improvements
• Full no_std support for both encoder and decoder
• WASM SIMD128 support

License

Licensed under either Apache License, Version 2.0 or MIT license at your option.

Contributing

Contributions welcome! Please feel free to open issues or pull requests.

Credits

• image-rs/image-webp - Original crate this was forked from
• libwebp (Google) - Reference implementation and algorithm source
• wide (Lokathor) - Portable SIMD types
• archmage & magetypes (Lilith) - Safe intrinsics
• safe_unaligned_simd (Lilith) - Safe unaligned SIMD operations
• Claude (Anthropic) - AI development assistance

Code review recommended for production use.