State of the JPEG2000 Standard?

ehb asks: "With all the (r)evolutions going on in networking (IPv6), video (MPEG4/H.264) and audio (MPEG4 AAC), I was wondering what happened to that big image compression promise of some years ago: JPEG2000. According to the official JPEG2000 page, although the entire standard not is completed, the important parts are, which would allow JPEG2000 to function as a still-image replacement for the old JPEG! I have seen lists of software programs that implement (parts?) of the JPEG2000 specification, but missed the important ones (web browsers, etc). There even exists an Open source implementation of the codec, so what is holding everything back? The benefits over normal JPEGs are huge, so can someone shed some light on the hold-up?" Back in April of 2002, JPEG2000 was "coming soon", and it was touted as being the "the future of imaging", but after that the hype seems to have dried up. What happened to this promising specification? Did another format surpass it (PNG, perhaps)?

Comments

Standards are often late

[booch]

I'm wondering when the CSS 3 standard will be completed. It started in 1999, I think. Four years is pretty long, considering how quickly the first 2 versions came out.

I seem to recall Fortran 90 finally coming out in maybe 1993 or so. I think they were originally going to call it Fortran 88.

I guess there are several problems: 1) standards are designed by committee; 2) unlike the first revision of a standard, more people are involved, each having their own agenda; 3) they want to test out the features in actual implementations before ratifying the standard; 4) if the features of the standard are overly difficult to implement (see #2) it'll take longer to work out the kinks.