4CHAN THUMBNAILING FUNCTION MYSTERY

just something to discuss...

noticed something odd while making a reverse image search thing
for the gif board,

4chan thumbnails are the bomb! 

i put a 4chan thumbnail next to a same pic thumb i made with php.  i even varied the thumbnail quality so i could compare
the file sizes.

turns out 4chan thumbs are really CLEAR at a lower file size
than what comes out by straight resizing with php.

how is that done?  what language/technique is used there? wtf.

>>4
It's on Moot's list. Also no single color will work right, I'm hoping for PNG thumbnails but that'll make them much larger.

It's amazing in 2011 we don't have a decent lossy format with alpha support we can use in the web. I guess you can use a monochrome JPEG and render manually to a <canvas>. That'd require 10 lines of code though, which is 5 times over 4chan's annual coding budget.