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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? Other than to simply start solidifying platform specific requirements for websites and other such nonsense, i see no compelling reason why we should even give this a second glance. Besides, Microsoft does know that compression algorithms already present in JPEG can go further than they typically do resulting in smaller, yet more distorted images just like their "Microsoft format" JPEG, although I will allow that some of their approach is a bit more flexible than the current JPEG standard.
But the fundamental issue is that if Microsoft was being truly open and supportive of commonly used standards, this compression format would not require any click through agreement whatsoever to implement and would not require Windows Media Photo.
Steven Wells, quoted in the article as saying "Licensing can kill this" is absolutely correct.
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Dude just do a subband contrast threshold analysis on the image and you can often find that you can compress using the DWT (discrete wavelet transform) (JPEG2000) with ratios like 4:1 or better while still having a visually lossless compression. As long as the conrasts in the distortions in the various subbands are below the contrasts in the image data itself (in those subbands), the image is pretty much visually lossless.
Like, duh.
MS got flamed for this on digg, and the few posts which are already here do the same, but I'm not so pessimistic about it.
;)
Jpeg sucks, this should be clear to anyone who tried to compare it to Jpeg2000, for example. Unfortunately, J2k seems to be stuck, and since most browsers don't support it by default (even the upcoming IE7 and Opera 9), using this format on web is suicide.
So, if this new format performs at about J2k level, and uses less resources to do so, I'm happy MS introduced it. Due to relative suckiness of jpeg, a lot of space and bandwidth is wasted in everything from cameras to online image galleries. If MS gets the licensing right, it could be a very welcome addition to the image compression methods.
Of course, a stupid/evil license can kill either the format, or whoever tries to use it
From Wikipedia :
Windows Media Photo processes images at 16x16 macroblocks.
Microsoft claims that Windows Media Photo offers a perceptible image quality comparable to JPEG 2000
If you use blocks, you will get block effects. While JPEG2000 don't use blocks. So I'm sceptical about that image quality claim... It might be true when you take speed rather than size into account, however.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Not true. Look at the source of the page. You'll see that the "I accept" button is at actually a simple GET request to here. If you paste that into your location bar and then click the link on the right hand side of the page that comes up, you get the the spec.
I'm not sure of the legality of direct linking to their .doc file without agreeing to some nonsense EULA, but they put it on the web, so they have to expect a link here and there.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
GIF got popular because everyone *thought* it was free for a long time before Unisys unearthed their submarine.
Flash and Real Audio are crap.
The PDF format is completely open and documented, and you arent required to agree to any licenses to use it or to write software that reads or writes it (And in fact there is quite a bit of software that does just that - you could go an entire life using PDF *without* using any software from Adobe)
The primary reason to favor jpg and gif over png on web pages is that png support in MSIE has not been very good. Go figure.
I mostly use Paint Shop Pro (v8.x) for image development (I started with PSP more than a decade ago). The lossless png format with layers, alpha, etc appears to be a solid format for use during image manipulation and for archiving-- but it is less convenient than PSP's proprietary format so I haven't done much with it. Yet. As I'm in the process of a very slow migration to GIMP, I expect I'll be using png more "in house". Converting my archived development images (that can run to 12 MB or more, what with all the layers, etc) to png will probably be the best way to move them from PSP to GIMP. If I can do all my development in png, then I'll be pretty certain that I can access my archived images from any image manipulation software I'm likely to use in the future (it is unlikely that I'd ever use an MS product... but PhotoShop, or something from Canon or Kodak might be in my future).
But to get back to your question-- I can't think of any reason except poor browser support for not using the png format. And poor browser support is increasingly a thing of the past (Firefox, Opera, etc are continually improving png capabilities and rendering speeds).