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MS Proposes JPEG Alternative
automatix writes "Microsoft's new competitor to the omnipresent JPEG format has been shown at WinHEC and is discussed on CNET. The Windows Media Photo format has many promises associated with it. The program manager is claiming 'We can do it in half the size of a JPEG file.'. While 'the philosophy has been that licensing should not be a restriction', it is interesting that the specification requires a click-through agreement to even read it."
So, my question is fundamentally..........WHY?
DRM.
(Oh, and expect PNG support in IE7 to be downgraded)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
All the exciting features apart, will Microsoft release the file format as an open standard ? That is the big question. Any new file format is most welcome as long as they are open and not controlled by propritery licences.
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My first reaction is:
GIF, JPG, and PNG do everything I need -- why a new image format?
My second reaction is:
Ok, I'm innovative, so maybe there is a good reason for a new image format. Maybe I'll read more. But then I re-read it's from Microsoft and it's got called Windows in it's name, and I think I've got enough MS and Win in my life -- I really don't want more.
Conclusion: No thanks.
boxlight
But seriously, is anyone else smelling that special scent of Microsoft imperialism where their current markets aren't satiating their need to dominate? I mean, they used to make only operating systems (which took them a while to perfect) and then they made Office (which took them a while to perfect) and then they made the Xbox and now they want us to use a new photo format?
I don't mind my JPEGs taking up 2 ~ 3MB each, in fact I prefer PNG which are small and widely supported. Granted, they're not half the size of a JPEG but--you know what?--PNG doesn't have a lawsuit history like JPEG & GIF have.
PNG is only lossless compression so I suppose it's only natural to switch to a file format that can be either lossless or lossy & will adequately adjust performance of the 'decoding' of the file if you select lossy. After reading the articles linked in the story, it sounds like Microsoft did a good job in the algorithm for this one
My work here is dung.
We've been down similar roads before (ActiveX, WMV etc)
No thanks.
-- 3 events that reshaped the world in the 20th century: WW1, WW2, and WWW
It's hard to see how even MS's third-rate programmers could make the PNG support worse than it is in IE6.
TEE
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Mostly, what this tells you is that Microsoft is confused and doesn't know what they are doing in this area.
First of all, compression really isn't an issue with digital cameras or image storage. Among other things, the fact that most serious photographers store RAW images is a good indication of that.
Second, lumping together JPEG and JPEG 2000 as "JPEG" doesn't make sense; JPEG 2000 already has all the advantages that Windows Media Photo claims, but it's an open standard. Microsoft should implement it, as should electronics manufacturers.
Third, Microsoft is overestimating their market position and significance in the digital imaging market.
I suppose you can't fault them for trying, but this particular attempt at monopolizing the market looks pretty pathetic.
You seem to be forgetting that you're able to read Slashdot (or any Internet site) because the Internet allows you to connect from your desktop machine/laptop/etc. to Slashdot's server(s). It's an *OPEN STANDARD* called TCP/IP that allows you to do that and it doesn't matter what operating systems are running on either of those two computers (or indeed any other network devices on the network between you and Slashdot).
Sure, the new Microsoft standard may well be completely open but their past history suggests it probably won't be. Thus, applying your logic to networking standards, if those too were closed then that would restrict you from accessing a lot of good stuff on any intranet or the Internet because not every operating would support those networking protocols - it might even result in you paying more for every byte you download because someone somewhere has to pay a license to use a closed standard.
Added to this, please be aware that the majority of large internet web & mail servers run a UNIX-type operating system - they always have done and they probably always will do.
So whilst I would not argue that most desktops run Windows, this is not the case for the whole Internet.
And as to getting work done, the only time I run a Windows operating system these days is for gaming - every serious piece of work I do is on Linux in a company that uses a Windows-based infrastructure. Yes, it's taken me time to sometimes get stuff to work properly but it does - and I end up being more productive as a result because I can, for example, edit text files far quicker in Vi than I can in Notepad.
If Windows is your OS of choice then good luck to you & I hope you enjoy your computing as much as I do mine - but please don't make incorrect sweeping statements...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
The future is obviously going to be media heavy, with tons of pics/videos all over the place. As such, better media formats are required. No doubt.
But when MS bundles decoders with the OS, it automatically gets a huge installed base. Now how will an open format compete with that, which the users will have to download? The MS format might get adopted even if it is proprietary. Which is very very bad.
jpeg2k has no adoption is for the same reason.
Interestingly, this is where a "platform" like Firefox becomes more important. As a delivery channel, of open formats. If Firefox ever becomes the dominant browser, that will solve a lot of the distribution problems. Of course, the Firefox team will decide what to bundle, but I am sure they are nice people.
Life is just a conviction.
...and pretty much useless for photos, unless one is happy with very large files.
Why not?
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with proposing another file format. The current formats we have now or in the future are never going to be good enough and there will always be room for improvement.
Having said all that, I agree with the parent comment in the fact that licencing will make or break this format and the click-through agreement doesn't bode well.
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Yes, that's exactly what they're doing. And it's a really butchered attempt too. So fine, they have this great new codec -- tiff has a well tested mechanism for specifying a new pixel codec. If they did it this way, they would loose absolutely no functionality - but no, they had to introduce gratuitous incompatibilities, new tags that duplicate exactly the capabilities of existing tiff tags, and remove baseline tiff capabilities. All while maintaining the 32 bit file size limitations of tiff.
What a hack job. I would recommend anybody to stay (far, far) away from supporting this format until there is a (very) strong business case for it (Be pragmatic -- don't loose money over it, but don't help this become standard).
In summary, the MS we've come to know and love is here in full force.
Ian Ameline
...and it's JPEG2000, and this try from MS is nothing but a mimic (integer operations, lossy and lossless, partial decoding, block sizes, bw and color, int and floating point precision, image sizes, xml metadata, you name it).
We don't need cameras supporting an MS image format, no sir, we need cameras supporting state of the art standards in image formats, for which MS brings nothign new with this move.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Clearly someone's never shot in RAW format before.
New photo format from MS! Yay! I'm sure digicam makers will _gladly_ embrace it after Microsoft fucked them over with FAT patent royalties enforcement.
It's so silly. The only one who should be able to file suit is Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier. After all, the JPEG standard is a DCT is a DFT.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
This is a topic that can be very difficult to grasp. There are multiple semester courses in Fourier analysis in college. I'll try to make this as simple as possible.
/\/\/\/ ) we can see that it almost looks like a sine wave. We can, in fact, convert the triangle wave into a summation of cosine waves. The main cosine wave has a frequency equal to the frequency of the triangle wave. We can then add a second, higher frequency cosine wave to the first, and this helps our waveform fit the triangle waveform better. We can continue with higher and higher frequencies until we have an almost exact representation. Corners in sound waves are very high frequency transitions, because the wave direction is changing very fast. This is why a 44.1kHz waveform sounds much better than an 8kHz waveform. Higher frequencies can be represented when the samples are converted into cosine waves to be played back. Thus, the frequency is like the detail of the sound.
It is easier to explain with sound first.
Imagine how a recording of your voice looks, when converted to an image of a sound wave.
This waveform has peaks and valleys. If we take a triangle wave (
Frequency, when related to an image, is like the detail in an image.
The frequency, in this case, is the frequency of the cosines used to represent this image.
The cosines in a 2-d image can be imagined as taking the height of the cosine as the brightness value. The lowest value is black, and the brightest value is white. Imagine we have vertical bars of gradients from black to white. Higher frequency cosines will result in more bars in the image. These bars can be in the X (horizontal) or Y (vertical) direction.
We can add these bars together and create an image.
The basis of the fourier transform is to take an image, and convert it into this cosine representation. If we do this, we then have a list of the frequency of the cosines in the X and Y directions.
Going back to the detail in an image:
If we remove the higher frequency cosine waves, and convert the remaining data back into an image, we get a blurred version of the original image. This is the basis for many of the image filters in programs like Photoshop.