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Forgent Squeezing Money Out Of JPEG, Other Patents
deman1985 writes "Forbes reports that Forgent Networks, Inc., developer of scheduling software and holder of a number of technology patents, has settled with both Adobe and Sony for JPEG patent infringement and is going after numerous others to collect their fair share of royalties. The company also plans to go after PVR companies, including TiVo Inc, and MP3 player makers for other various patents they claim to hold. Sounds like more fun in the courts for everyone!" We previously reported on Forgent's JPEG patent shenanigans back in April.
PNG is good for its own purposes, but it's no .jpg replacement. JPG = lossy and phenomenal compression, where PNG = nonlossy and kind-of-average compression.
.jpg could get the same point across in under 100KB.
.gif, but not for .jpg, yet.
Take a high resolution screenshot with any complexity and save it as a PNG, and you might be lucky to get it in under 600KB, where a
PNG is a good replacement for
...even though the Joint Photographic Experts Group tried to create a format that wasn't encumbered by patents. Where will the madness end?
According to the earlier /. article, the patent in question is on run-length coding, and was issued in 1987. Unless it was submarined for a really long time, there's got to be prior art all over the place. If nothing else, the Amiga's IFF ILBM image format uses RLC, and it's been around since 1985, at least.
I tried it, 1536x1152 PNG, JPG (q=75%), JPG (q=95%).
Apart from the bigger filesize, JPG shows ugly artifacting. Note: I don't use too many antialiased fonts, and no fancy backgrounds and skins. If most of your desktop is covered by a photographic JPG image in the first place, you will find different results, of course.Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
I can think of two successors to JPEG...
JPEG 2000
JPEG 2000 is "the" successor to JPEG (designed by the same team), and was noticeably better than JPEG when I checked out quality vs size, but it's patent encumbered. It is however intended to be royalty and license-fee free.
Elysium Ltd has developed a freeware Netscape plugin to make IE, Opera and Netscape browsers able to view JPEG 2000 pictures. This plugin is for Windows, and I don't really know if there are others for other platforms.
DjVu
DjVu was designed for the web to replace common formats like JPEG, GIF and TIFF. Although designed primarly for compressing text, it's very efficient at regular photos as well, and should compress similarly as JPEG 2000 (about half the size of JPEG with similar quality).
DjVuLibre is a GPL licensed open source implementation that includes plugins, viewers, and encoders for this format.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Sorry, I linked to a DjVu community page and not the official one.
DjVu is a trademark of LizardTech Inc (which also provides browser plugins for MacOS etc etc).
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
{Stupid Joke Mode:ON}
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So, now, when's Xiph.org going to add a lossy codec for photorealistic picture in it's OGG software ?
And then we'll start again some kind of "OGG/Twoflower" vs. "WindowsMedia/MS-JPEG-2004.NET" codec war.
{/Stupid Joke Mode:OFF}
Actually, I realy mean it !
According to the foot note of this article,
they don't have a patent for the JPEG compression standart it self,
but for the run lenght encoding (RLE) compression which is used in one of the latest stage of JPEG compression.
Which means two things
- It is not a threat to lossy compression.
All the strenght of JPEG comes from the DCT (discret cosine transforme) and the subsequent quantization, which convert the picture into a stream of more compressible values repetitive values (and thus perfom the actual "lossy" steps).
RLE isn't the only way for compress these values,
One can use algorithms similar to those used in the final steps by Xiph's (!) Speex or by Monkey Audio (=Rice).
So one can imagine that Xiph could easily create a temporary JPEG replacement until some realy better (Wavelet based ?) patent-free format is created.
(Hence my stupid joke at the begining).
- Second thing
There's probably A LOT of prior acts for this patent, as LZW was one of the most popular compression algorithme on the old personnal computers of the 80s.
> Take a high resolution screenshot with any complexity and save .jpg could get the same point across in under 100KB.
> it as a PNG, and you might be lucky to get it in under 600KB,
> where a
A screenshot is a very bad example. It's almost NEVER better to save screenshot using a lossy compression algorithm such as JPEG. Screenshots are always better as GIF/PNG.
JPEG is designed for compressing PHOTOGRAPHS and nothing else. It severely messes up screenshots and text unless set to extremely high quality. But if you set it to extremely high quality, the file size is usually much bigger than a PNG would be anyway.
I'm amazed at how many authors of programming articles still don't know basic web fundamentals such as how to save a screenshot.
To summarise:
Save screenshots/diagrams/charts (large areas of flat colour/text) as PNG/GIF
Save photographs as JPEG
"I guess the prior art does not stand in court."
To my knowledge, it has not yet tried.
It never will be and never was intended to be, for exactly the reason you stated above: PNG is lossless, while JPEG is lossy. These are two different types of tool, which serve two different purposes. PNG will never achieve the compression rates of JPEG. Just use the right tool for the job.
Would flac ever replace or eliminate the need for mp3 and ogg? No, for the same reason. flac, being lossless, serves an entirely different purpose than mp3 and ogg.
(Some time in the future, I would imagine that disk space will become so cheap and abundant that lossy compression is unnecessary, but in that case I would say that cheap disks -- not lossless compression -- have eliminated the need for lossy compression.)