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OSTA Announces MultiPhoto/Video Specification
krazyninja writes "The Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA), and the International Imaging Industry Association (I3A), have announced the release of v1.0 MultiPhoto/Video specs. This specifies a standard framework for storing and managing digital image content on CDs/DVDs. Companies such as HP and Roxio are involved in this development. Note that there is a similar spec for audio called MultiAudio, also from OSTA."
yah well , i womder if they gonna try 2 come out with some anti-piracy scheme for it as well...
or that would be the headache of the recording companies or whoever employ this technology
If microsoft doesnt support this, or it doesnt get supported by winamp, it will end up falling by the wayside. Who needs another crappy video codec when we have mpg?
When life gives you crap, Make Crapade.
Sluggy Freelance.
MPEG is severly dated, in my opinion, when we have stuff that can produce great quality at low bitrates. And, hell, this is an upstart isn't it? What kind've of open mind would say that we shouldn't even try and look into/make? another codec and blindly follow whatever preconcieved notions we have.
something needs to be..
My mother, gave my sister, the family foto album.. now I have it, and I'm in the process of digitizing it...
all of my kids, will have copies (albeit digital) and with video clips, and with audio snippets... and their children (presumably) will, and so on.. how about a standard, that saves these scrapbooks, so they can be merged easily..
Fictionalized example- I use kodaks 'scraps' program, and give my son a 500 gig optical disk with everything.. he meets and marries in due time a woman who's family chose to use polaroids 'memories' they buy one or the other, and just 'merge' the memories.. they can hand each child a copy issued custom to them.. with added material.. (lables for photos now say great grandparent in stead of grandparent, et'cetera..)
of course, it has to be open format, something that allows new technologies to add gracefully (a hologram or other 3-d memory)
What kind of DRM nasties are in this? And what are the odds that this new format will run only on CD/DVD players powered by Windows Media and Windows XP for Home Appliances Edition? They will copy protect your own photos for you, just in case you might happen to take a picture of a copy protected work somewhere. You wont be sending those photos off to your brother or sister unless you pay your monthly $19.95 Multiphoto Subscriber Plus+ license (but it works with broadband and AOL!).
I smell trouble. I smell lots of trouble. Whenever companies like HP and Roxio get involved, I am concerned for the well being of embedded, appliance-like devices.
Distopian future? Absolutely. Soon we wont be able to print our own photos without a watermark of the printers manufacturer. Free advertising! And it will be against DMCA to remove the watermarks! What a joyus future indeed!
OSTA! == Buy!
Scary when you think about it.
In dream society, people could be given the ability to mod replies. In real life, it would be disaster.
Why not just use UDF packet-written CDs? What advantage does this new, properietary, probably DRMed format have over good ol' UDF with a load of .jpeg and .mpeg files?
P.S. I wish Linux UDF-write support worked - then I could start using CDs as giant floppies...
Why on Earth does everything
What I meant to say was, why does everything there days have to use XML? Is a technology somehow old-hat if it doesn't use XML, or something?
quote: "The XML-based metadata does not store the content itself, merely references to it..." Why the XML everyehere?
Whatever happened to the old PictureCD format? It seemed to work pretty well everytime I've used it and most DVD players support it.
Periodic table of the elements, (C) 1999 Microsoft
Seriously, I've read most of the links now on the OSTA site, and I can't see anything that looks like DRM.
/.
Repeatedly all I can find is that this is hardware/OS independant, and that non 'MPV-aware' software/hardware will still play the media because its just an extension system, that it is royalty-free...
So what is this - well this is my interpretation:
This is a index and archiving approach, using XML as a metadata format to support the approach.
Currently on a CD/DVD you have the ISO9660 filesystem that tells the firmware/software the bare minimum to access the data.
MPV looks like it takes this a step further, similar to what Kodak did with the PhotoCD standard, so that aware applications can get access to a fast loading and more descriprive index of the media on the disk.
So its an evolution of the filesystem that supports media content rather than raw data files.
I don't see that it mandates a particular underlying file system, or file format, or DRM, or brand of hardware.
Its just a standard to provide and index so that 'MPV aware' software/hardware can understand the media better and do more with it. If you're not MPV aware - then you just get the data in the filesystem like you do today.
Now if you've ever tried to use something like Uleads Photo Explorer to find the image you want off your CD-R archive and waited whilst the drive thrashed through the whole 700MB to generate thumbnails, or tried to use WinOnCD to generate CD PhotoAlbums by a neat use of the VCD standards - then you will know that this is possible, but not the easiest it should be.
How much nicer would it be just to dump your images onto media with some notes and categories, and for it to just work, in your PC, on your folks DVD player, in your mates IMac, heck even your local tame guru's *NIX boxen?
And I'm a lot happier seeing this done by an organisation with a broad range of interests, software, hardware, industry, consumers etc. I don't want OS forcing this on me with thier own agenda - M$ or *NIX - I don't want Media Industry influenced hardware companies like Sony utting thier own spin on it.
If this is to succeed then it needs contributions from a wide range of sources, that will keep it balanced and open. Look at how common HTML has become under the care of the W3C - and it still by and large resists customisation and bending towards specific views because so many diverse interests are part of the process.
Lets not view every technology announcement as a modern day 'REDs under the BED'('DRM under the HOOD??') paranoia - yes lets keep our eyes out, and when we are worried DO SOMETHING rather than rant. But lets not let the actions of RIAA/Fritz/M$/MPAA et al colour our views of every new announcement - that way they win. Lets remember that spirit of 'gosh wow' that drove the early internet and gave us
I'm prepared to be wrong, but to paraphrase 'To a hammer every problem is a nail' lets not end up as 'To the slashdot community every announcement has hidden DRM'
I had the initial alarm and what do we need this for when I first looked at it. But it is being done by folks with lots of experience with image file manipulation and in the same way as the original TIFF redbook spec. However just like TIFF, it will be interesting to see how some "spec compliant files" break "spec compliant viewers".
"I went on a diet, swore off drinking and heavy eating. And in fourteen days, I had lost exactly two weeks. Joe E. Lewis
TIFFs that wonderfully non-standard standard format :) I feel your pain after several years of processing sat image data...
That's always a danger where there are a number of things that you can embed in the format, and only a number of 'mandatory' sections.
But we've learnt - HTML works largely because stuff that clients don't understand is ignored, and good quality HTML degrades gracefully.
From a quick look at the spec, this is a metadata format, not a filesystem. It's intended for more than CD/DVD media as well, notably flash filesystems, which are different of technical necessity.
It seems to be mostly oriented toward labelling, describing and presenting collections of images. For what a first look is worth it doesn't necessarily suck, either. They mention dublin core metadata.
A nice add on to comments in the jpeg header, anyway.
You misunderstand. This is a format for the metadata and layout. Metadata such as structural metadata, linking one image to another (say, to describe formally that images 1-100.jpg are a sequence of stills from a video, and that 101-200.jpg are thumbnails of same) or technical metadata about the image creation/capture process (and a whoooole lot more which I won't even start on).
This stuff is important, complex and probably not for 99% of the Slashdot crowd. We (at a national copyright library) are using METS (Metdata Encoding and Transmission Standard) as metadata on our digital objects, and METS has an extension schema for AV stuff, which seems to be similar to this.
Other than RIAA and Hollywood is finding it too hard to cram DRM into them? This has a foul odor about it, n'est ce pas?
.nosig
Like I said. Please hush.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
How much will we have to pay to use this standard and how many restrictions will it place on how our software works ? (I.e. can we decide not to implement a part of it we don't want ? (DRM))
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Here's a practical start. Check out igal, which generates and publishs an entire online picture show (HTML slides, thumbnails and index page included) with just one command line invocation. HTML is open and easy to parse, not to mention edit by hand to add those custom touches. You can build your classes of relationships external to the archive itself to merge things as you wish or simply make new indexes to the images.
I'm crurrently building html indexes of my files. It's easy enough to put friends and family into seperate directories then family names in seperate directories under family then link events by hand elsewhere. Such segmentation helps at archive time and adding to it is as easy as dropping a new directory. Good organization makes itself felt in any media, paper or digital.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
While it is tempting to raise the warning about DRM, as some posters have done, this standard doesn't have any DRM anything in it. This is a standard that is very much aimed at normal end-user consumers for doing things like organizing their digital photos and relating them to each other in interesting ways.
As others have said, this is a metadata standard. It's not a new video/image format. It's about how existing formats relate to each other. It works over existing file systems and is file system neutral.
This is a standard for defining collections of digital media in an xml-based format. This can be useful for things like stating explicitly in metadata the relationship between a full size image and its thumbnail (simple example). A more complex and interesting scenario would involve defining a collection of images, video and audio so that they can be played in a certain order, creating a slideshow. If a device is MPV aware, it parses the xml file that defines the slideshow and presents the media. If the device is not MPV aware all of the files are still on the file system, just as they are today and they can still be accessed.
Another example: Say you had an MPV-aware digital camera that stored this metadata. You decide to burn the MPV and files created by your camera onto a CD. You could then watch it in your MPV aware DVD player or MPV aware PC. Nothing would stop you from seeing the underlying files.
There are numerous other examples of why having extensive metadata information on digital assets can be quite useful.
The other cool thing about this is that it is open source and available on sourceforge http://sourceforge.net/projects/mpvtools.
This standard is similar to the High-MAT standard announced recently by Microsoft and Panasonic. But MPV is actually out and unlike High-MAT it is open source and requires no licensing fees.
I wonder if this means the end to Cat-Photo... although Cat-Photo still has some advantages to MPV - especially simplicity.
http://cat-photo.sourceforge.net/
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This technology must be what prevented its distribution during my mom's
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