Suddenly a JPEG Patent and Licensing Fee

Michael Long writes "Forgent Networks (www.forgentnetworks.com) has announced that it owns the software patent on JPEG compression technology, and has stated that it is "in contact" with computer, software, camera, and other digital imaging product manufacturers regarding licensing terms. This ambush of the digitial imaging industry will probably stand as the worst public relations nightmare a company can inflict upon itself."

Comments

Lifetime of patent?

[suso]

Don't patents have a lifetime of 17 years? I may be wrong on that number. But if is 17 years then that means that it expires in 2003. Maybe they figure that they can milk the royalties for the last year they have the patent.

Re:They should do well with this...

[Bonker]

better image quality? you just finished saying png is lossless, and jpg is lossy. how can it be better image quality? its WORSE image quality. but at a much better file size.

Get yourself a reasonably noisy, graidient toned image. Any given photograph will do. Resize it in the editor of your choice, Photoshop, PSP, the GIMP, or any of a dozen others. Then, set yourself a reasonable filesize, like about 90k for a full-screen image.

Save it as a jpg, reducing the quality enough so that it fits within your target filesize. Now save it as a png, reducing the color depth enough to get as close to 90k as you possibly can.

You probably *won't* be able to compress a full screen image with PNG to 90k without only using 2 colors, but get as close as you can. Now examine the two images, each of which should have *some* distortion, regardless of the fact that PNG is lossless at 24 and 32 bit color depth. This is because PNG is *NOT* lossless at lower bit-depths and has to dither color information just like GIF.

Despite the fact that the two files will be approximately the same file size, the jpeg will look much better and clearer even if it is much smaller than the jpeg.

If you don't beleive me, please see the following two files I've created for demonstration purposes:

http://www.furinkan.net/amethyst.png

http://www.furinkan.net/amethyst.jpg

Since Adobe's PNG library is not as efficient at compression as some out there, I've given the PNG image 20 extra K or so on the jpeg. As you can see, the jpeg is flawless unless you start looking at it in depth on a pixel-by-pixel basis while the PNG image is visibly flawed.