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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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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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for all things on Linux
If they're offering it as an alternative, why? If they're offering it as a replacement, we already have JPEG2000 thanks. I guess they've given up all pretense of caring and now are going all out for a file-formats landgrab in an effort to shore up their userbase before the shit hits the fan.
Anyway, shouldn't they be concentrating on finishing Vista?
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
Well, I clicked the "I do not agree" button, and it still takes you through to the details...
Since the above is about as likely as duck being joined by a flying pig...
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.
PNG - No royalties (ever), no click thru, open source, available to all, proven, lossless and no pattent or copyright that will cause issues.
Isn't there already an alternative called PNG? And doesn't it have existing support? Who cares about 1/2 the file size w/ 4GB flash memory cards available all over the place? It definitely sounds like MS is pointing out false arguments to have an MS-licensed image format that they can control. It sounds very dangerous to me. If it was a RAW-like format at half the size, or something that addresses modern image issues, it would be different.
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
If they can keep from killing it with DRM and licensing, I for one would love to have a photo format where the quality doesn't degrade as much as JPEG does at high compression.
Ofcourse this is a biased comment but after reading stories like these one has to wonder if MS doesn't change its priorities and if so; for what reason. When it comes to doing "good for the masses" MS is at an absolute bottom of the list, all they're doing is for their own profit, thats also what made them into the company they are today. The only real innovation MS has done is IMO the userinterface. That's an absolute given, they know how to distribute a desktop environment which can also be used by computer newbies.
MS has become quite big by raping standards. They're basicly picking up a product, pay for it if they have to, and start to reverse-engineer it (or something like that) and eventually come up with an own variant, thus hoping to push the original competitor out of the market (and they succeeded with that quite a couple of times, just check the history). Naturally we don't have open standards, thus tieing even more people to their products.
So my biased conclusion? Vista is going to pieces right now, the development costs are becoming staggering and new money is needed. But with big competitors like Google and Sun (to name my 2 favorites) the market has become hard. What to do? Once again copy a famous (or widely common) standard, promise to make it "bigger, better and faster" and tie the copy to your own product line. Most of the media will call it better and smoother (but they again; they'd do that with anything new) and the circus can start all over again.
One has to wonder how long MS can manage to play this game.
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.
The dominant image formats that we have are just fine: JPEG, GIF and PNG. Each one has its specific use (JPEG for photos, GIF for 8-bit or animated images, and PNG for alpha or lossless images.)
Currently, I can't think of anything new that this WMP (wimp?) format can do. Unless they can pack all this into ONE format:
1) Compression without introducing artifacts.
2) Accurate color, contrast and brightness.
3) Animation.
4) Alpha channel.
If they can squeeze that into one format, we wouldn't need 3 different formats anymore.
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
JPEG 2000:
JPEG 2000 is not widely supported in present software due to the perceived danger of software patents on the mathematics of the compression method, this area of mathematics being heavily patented in general. JPEG 2000 is by itself not license-free, but the contributing companies and organizations agreed that licenses for its first part - the core coding system - can be obtained free of charge from all contributors.
So basically, it's free for the moment, but who knows if it'll stay that way.
Reading all of 31 pages of the document makes me understand that it is just an attempt to hijack tiff an bend it with MS patented pixel codec to become incompatible with existing tiff technology. Salted with Adobe XMP metadata, ICC metadata and EXIF metadata. All of that registered as a Microsoft trademark. Did I missed something?
There you are, staring at me again.
All images encoded with Windows Media Photo have a blue cast to them
--- What?
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.
My first thought was that there was no way anybody would actually use this format but Micrsoft has enough power to blackmail^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H convince enough web sites or application developers to use this format that eventually everyone would have to have this regardless if they wanted it or not.
And I don't beleive for one second that this is really "open". Microsoft would never do anything unless it benifited them somehow.
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.
OPEN specifications only, please. it has to be supported on all platforms.
these two ideas, core to the net, means that Microsoft and its eely, oily ways should be barred from submitting the spec.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I think you're confusing JPEG with JPEG-LS. Yes, they are both "JPEG"s but I don't think many applications natively support JPEG-LS. In fact, I wanted to use it in Photoshop and had to go get a plug-in. Whether or not JPEG-LS is as efficient as the new proposed MS format, I do not know. I think that JPEG-LS was slow to catch on because people just didn't care about upgrading their software to use it. I would wager that Microsoft will force third party software to support their new filetype.
I'm not even sure if my browser supports JPEG-LS and I know that programming with JPEG-LS can be a pain if you're looking for libraries to read/write lossless compression image files.
My work here is dung.
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.
We don't know what the ultimate (if any) licensing regime will be for this.
1) It looks like the algorithms won't be able to be patented in the European Union, so there'll be nothing to stop someone in the EU implementing their own software to do this and read/write from/to MS generated pictures.
2) Elsewhere, this could act as a differentiator for MS office. If the default image format in MS-Office is this new one, and applications that use ISO/IEC 26300-compliant (ODF-compliant) formats cannot use it due to patent restrictions, then this could act as a tool to prevent people from moving to applications that use ISO/IEC 26300-compliant methods of storing their files.
I cant wait to see what wmf like features this one has. If it doesnt have at least one vulnerability (buffer overflow, embeded executable code....) I refuse to use it.
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
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.
However, JPG isn't an open standard, is it? Isn't it controlled by proprietary licenses as well?
JPEG is a standard, created by the Joint Photographic Experts Group. The problem with it is that it's entirely lossy. It's great for final images but any time you edit an image you'll lose more and more of the detail.
PNG is a newer open standard that was created in part to address the issue of loss. Prior to PNG many people used the GIF format, which is losless as well, but GIF has licensing/patent issues. Most mainstream web browsers, graphics editors, etc. now support PNG graphics natively.
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.
Microsoft... and 'the philosophy has been that licensing should not be a restriction'.
A HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
A HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
wipes tear from eye
WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
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please stop.....
WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
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*sound of side splitting....*
Seriously one of the funniest thing's I've heard resently...
I, for one, welcome our 50% smaller, lossy overlords...
$ touch
Woah, you mean we've got to use a second file extension if we switch to lossless?
That's far too much work, let's just invent an entire new standard, just so our image directories look neat.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
If you click the 'I agree' it takes you to download some file that ends in ".DOC" - since I couldnt find any specifications for *that* file, I wasnt able to read them.
"You may review these Materials only .. to interface with a Microsoft product"
.. ownership .. changes, Your right to use these Materials automatically terminates"
.. intellectual property claim"
.. of Your Feedback"
"MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND"
"If
"Microsoft may freely use, reproduce, license, distribute, and otherwise commercialize Your Feedback"
"You will not give Microsoft any Feedback (i) that You have reason to believe is subject to any
"Microsoft has no obligation to maintain the confidentiality
"You waive any defenses allowing the dispute to be litigated elsewhere"
"If any part of this Agreement is unenforceable, it will be considered modified to the extent necessary to make it enforceable"
from "Windows Media Photo Specification license agreement.
davecb5620@gmail.com
First of all, we are in the new, improved world of broadband. Bandwidth is hardly an issue as graphics are loaded and stored once and usually on a connection that is capable of some 50 KB/s or more.
I've been contracted to design high quality Vector(Flash)/Pixel(JPEG/GIF) graphics and animations for some of the largest and most exclusive hotels and restaurants in the world, and never have I had to think about limiting content because size is an important factor. As far as I can tell, news sites like CNN go for photographies for their news stories, but other than that, they go with GIF files to fast-loaded content for its 56K users. In other words, if you want to create a web site with smallish content, go for GIF. You can still do wonders with CSS and a piece of imagination.
I for one am confused here. Internet Explorer has been the worst of all large browsers when it comes to implementing new technology. It's still because of Internet Explorer that we can't use PNG as a standard, so good bye alpha channels. And despite this, they want to introduce something new? I don't get it. First, follow the standards thoroughly, THEN innovate.
I really don't think we need more pixel graphics standards that will take five years to become a standard. New vector graphics technology is fine, because that's where we're heading. And while we're at it, the problem when creating web sites is not visuals, but programming. It's amazing that you have to be an expert to make an IE/FF/SAF/OPE web site.
Full Tilt
hey microsoft, why don't you patch ie6 to work with alpha transparent pngs first (i know ie7 is supposed to work with them, but i don't have 4 years to wait until EveryMan(tm) has upgraded).
we have plenty of image formats that work for us, and most of us have broadband anyway.
-- lol pwned
So, my question is fundamentally..........WHY?
For consumers, because Microsoft actually makes high quality codecs. WMV has been highly competitive with MPEG4 AVC aka H.264, WMA has been highly competitve with AAC, I'm sure WMP will be highly competitve with JPEG2000 and the like. MPEG2, MP3 and JPEG are industry standards but behind the bleeding edge in compression technology. They'll all come preinstalled on the most popular OS and "just work".
For Microsofts part, because Microsoft wants to be the dominating standard of next-gen formats. Because if the three dominant formats are WMV (video), WMA (audio), WMP (photo) they can collect lots of licensing fees and Windows sales and so on. They control the features, they will always be first to release the implementation, everyone else is playing catch-up. Not to mention they will control WM*-DRM with a huge hold on all media.
Personally, I don't like WMP, I prefer Media Player Classic. But I also notice that some WMVs will not play properly using the standard DirectShow filters, ONLY in WMP. It's another one of those nice little hooks they pull. WM* formats work best not just on Windows, but WMP on Windows. But I must admit, that when I do play them the One Microsoft Way, they look and sound pretty damn good. In short, if you just take the very near-sighted approach and look at nothing but the quality, it's more of a "Why not?".
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Ok fine no one gets it. A banddand is a range of frequencies you will find in an image. As it turns out, we don't respond to error in an image by the image itself, but by the frequency that the error in the image disrupts. We're worse at seeing disruptions in the high and low range of frequencies, and better in the midrange. Somewhat ironically that means we can take advantage of the high and low and compress more inside those frequency ranges. A DWT or DCT wil give you component pieces for various frequencies which you can simply or delete to form the compression (DCT is JPEG, DWT is JPEG2000). Remember the square blocks in JPEG compression? That's from the DCT. The DWT is more circular so you'll never see square blocking with JPEG2000.
l er_5749_40.pdf
If anyone is interested and wants some not-so-light reading, check out http://foulard.ece.cornell.edu/publications/chand
It'd be awesome if someone made a compressor for regular images using this technique.
It's well-supported by Apple and OS X.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
I only did one Google search, but easily came up with this old article from last October. I haven't really followed the case, but it's one reason why MS may have done this.
1.You may read the specs only if you use them to write software which work with Microsoft products, or
2. To provide feedback on the Specs to Microsoft.
Duh... where's the "I wanna know if it's any good" option? I did a google of "Windows Media Photo" to see if there was any more stuff to read, but I didn't get anything more informative than the linked cnet article.
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.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
A pro photographer who is worried about quality will shoot RAW (or even film). A pro photographer who is interested in getting the picture out fast will shoot JPEG, because that's what the agencies and newspapers expect. Most will shoot both and run a JPEG out in the camera before emailing it back to the editorial office.
Also having lossy and lossless in one format isn't as useful as you might think. Lossy compression saves space and transmits faster (obviously) - you lose all those benefits if you then bind a lossless file to it.
I can't see what problem they're trying to solve: the three things that better lossy compression is supposed to help: storage, bandwidth and CPU cycles improve exponentially over time. It's a very very long time since I had to wait for Photoshop to open a JPEG (although RAW files still take an age).
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
...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.
Well, there is JPEG 2000 and its your loss if you don't use it http://www.jpeg.org/jpeg2000/
/ 12/0725217
The amazing, unbelievable thing made me "shrug" is they have the face to use "professional" word. I shouldn't RTFM really.
Professionals use RAW. RAW you hear me Microsoft? Also they use TIFF for transport. That is the established non lossy standard with some weird extensions, file variations. That is also why professional photographers will be the first Blu Ray recorder customers.
Nobody, nobody can dare to lose a PIXEL, single PIXEL. That is how you work in professional World.
Dear BillG if you are reading this: FIRE whoever came with that idea. Even Microsoft does not deserve to be robbed like that.
And people here (at geek sites) joked when Allume managed to come up with a lossless jpeg compressor. The camera manufacturer and memory manufacturer CARTEL insists on using JPEG , that is how you sell people 1 gigabyte memory cards but it is up to customer asking for jpeg 2000 format on equipment they buy.
So, there is still JPEG, one company (one of their interns I heard) managed to compress it by 30% levels and people joked about them. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01
Here is World's billions of dollars company coming up with a lossy format for PROFESSIONALS. I can only *shrug* sorry.
Please Microsoft, introduce your "format" to professionals who has nothing to do with your businesses and watch them laugh at you.
Even end users know RAW format.
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.
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).
They can try, but in the best case, I bet it would work about as well as when everyone tried it with GIF. Of course, that would require Microsoft's replacement to be an open standard, which it doesn't appear to be.
Since the use of compression is to compensate for lack of either 1) Storage or 2)Bandwidth I have to wonder how useful having a tighter compression format for pictures would be. Computers are faster, hard drives larger, broadband quicker. I'd like to see better LOSSLESS compression than lossy comrpession.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned this.
Microsoft's JPEG replacement leaves it with an option if the Forgent suit goes the wrong way. Acting as if it's happy to stop using JPEG gives Microsoft leverage in an out-of-court negotiation.
The patent in question expires in October 2006.
Just my two cents.
William vanRyper
GIF wasn't good enough because it was not free. WM* formats are Not Free. We should not even consider takeing into account formats that will ssteal our freedom. MP3 is not good enough, but we have Vorbis which is free and far better (about twice as quality as MP3, try 64kbps OGG and they sound good enough; try 64kbps MP3 and you'll agree with me).
So yes, a new format which is free? A good thing indeed. A new non-free format? No thanks. Nothing to see here. /moves along)
Well, according to NE asia's may edition, the USPTO is going reexamine forgent's patent (at the behest of The public patent foundation. But that's really kind of besides the point 'cause all of MS's products are going to come under patent attacks.
There's just too many software patents out there (and too many broad ones) for MS to work their way around all of them, forgent will just buy up some company with a patent on entropy encoding & turn around & sue MS.
If jpeg patents are MS's fear, a new image format is only going to buy them a little time, but if DRM is their goal, it makes perfect sense.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Sounds like another Windows Meta file scenario....
That from a company that wants to charge license fees for FAT? Yeah, right. They might not charge licensing fees now, but if this graphics standard ever gets to be twenty years old, not under active development, and ubiquitous, watch out.
Penny - plain text accounting
First of all, forget color. A color image is just three channels of black and white.
Imagine you have a back and white image which is pure white noise. Consider what a single horizontal line of that image would look like if you drew it as you would a sound wave, with the bright pixels being high, and the dark pixels being low.
As you step from one pixel to the next, you could have a change of up to 255. There's no predictable pattern. The "frequency" of this noise is high, because the potential difference from one pixel to the next is great.
Now imagine that you apply a smoothing filter to this line of noise, and bring the changes from one pixel down. That is what you get if you blur an image. Now the max differences from one pixel to the next is much lower. The frequencies in a blurry image are low.
There's other ways to consider the frequencies of an image as well. In Wavelets, you would scale the image down to 2x2, and this would be one layer of the image. Then you'd scale it down to 4x4, and scale up the 2x2 image with bilinear filtering and subtract it from the 4x4 image. The 4x4 difference image now represents a different set of frequencies than the 2x2 image did. You store the difference because what you're interested in is the frequency of the 4x4 layer. You want to add that frequency on top of the 2x2 layer when you reconstruct the image, and if you have that "frequency" seperated out, you can compress the data better.
Another way of looking for frequencies in an image is to seperate the image into bitplanes. I think TIFF does this, because it comrpessed the image about the same as seperating the image into bitplanes then compressing with zip. Anyway the idea here is to take all the first bits of each pixel and stick them one after another, and then stick the second bits of all the pixels one after the other... You'll end up with 8 images this way, and you'll find that the image with the highest bits is easily recognizeable and has clear sharp edges, but when you get to the image with the lowest bits, all you have is noise. If you discard that noise when reconstructing the image then you will get banding in the image, but you could in theory interpolate the values of the band above to fill in the noise. You'll lose noise in the image though so stuff will look smoother than it did. Wavelet does somethign similar when it discards the differences and smooths the portions of the image that are in between sharp edges.
Someone should change that to: "By accessing, using or providing feedback on these materials, or attempting to sue anyone over these materials you agree to the to give the person who altered this document $37,000,000,000 in US currency." And then promptly distribute it widely.
By the way, anyone replying to, reading, commenting about, or in any way accessing the material in this post; including but not limited to moderating, meta-moterating, storing in a database, retrieving from a database, viewing in a web browser, including it in or making a reference to it in a legal document, or accidentially glancing at this post agrees to send $100 to me for each occurance.
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
I was right there with you up until your final example. When I read, "...I can, for example, edit text files far quicker in Vi than I can in Notepad." I thought to myself, "What?" Obviously a user can download vi, or VIM or some such variant or even a completely different text editor for Windows that will give them the same functionality, of the text editor, that you have. Now there are real benefits to running Linux over Windows. You could have said, "when editing text, I'm edit text more quickly using Vi, cat, |, regexps, and the other CLI tools available than I can with Windows. The integration of the command line and the GUI environment allows me to script and integrate my workflows. "
I agree with pretty much every principal you stated, but I do take exception to your example.
1. You may review these Materials only (a) as a reference to assist You in planning and designing Your product, service or technology ("Product") to interface with a Microsoft product, specification, service or technology ("Microsoft Product") as described in these Materials; and (b) to provide feedback on these Materials to Microsoft. All other rights are retained by Microsoft; this Agreement does not give You rights under any Microsoft patents. You may not (i) duplicate any part of these Materials, (ii) remove this Agreement or any notices from these Materials, or (iii) give any part of these Materials, or assign or otherwise provide Your rights under this Agreement, to anyone else.
they're indicating that they already might have patents on this.
he he he
try clicking on the "I do not accept this agreement".. ha ha ha!! their web version of BSOD!
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.
If you click on the "I accept this agreement and want to download the Windows Media Photo Specification" button, it submits "I accept this agreement and want to download the Windows Media Photo Specification", and should take you to http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/wmphotodwn.mspx? . However, I didn't verify that.
Instead, I chose to look at the HTML, and manually submitted my own prefered value via manually entering the URL: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/wmphotodwn.mspx? I_Reject_The_Agreement_Terms_and_Suspect_Bill_Gate s_Blows_Goats. I also got taken to the download page. This page contains the notice "By installing, copying, or otherwise using the software, you agree to be bound by the terms of the license agreement.", and a download link to the actual specification document at http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/6/a/16acc 601-1b7a-42ad-8d4e-4f0aa156ec3e/WMPhotoSpec_v09.do c....
Oops.
Now, while I Am Not A Lawyer, I submitted my rejection of their license terms, so I'd argue in court I shouldn't be bound by them; and since this is a specification, and not itself software, I would also argue that the notice on the page I reached is moot. I suppose the case could be made that since Word macros are a turing-complete programming language, the word document is software, so I thought I'd look through using "less" to be on the safe side. Lo and behold, there is another license embedded:
Of course, if someone at a unix command prompt incanted something clever (say, curl -o Bill_Blows_Goats.txt -C 8261 http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/6/a/16acc 601-1b7a-42ad-8d4e-4f0aa156ec3e/WMPhotoSpec_v09.do c — and don't forget to remove the Slashdot inserted spaces) the Microsoft server would only give them the meaty parts (albeit in a form even OpenOffice would probably gag on), and omit the license. I'd be amused to hear the opinion of a Real Lawyer as to how binding the agreement co
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
GIF was good enough. PNG exists because the world is full of geeks who think that they are lawyers.
...) are stupid.
Or they wanted alpha channels and greater bit depths and better compression options.
ZIP is good enough. RAR and 7z (and bz2 and
WAV is not a compressed format. Apples and oranges.
Damn straight
MP3 is good enough. AAC is evil. (hint - the difference isn't quality, it is control)
AAC is MP4, a patented but open standard - just like MP3. Apples use of AAC in ITMS wraps the Fairplay DRM around that you are so coyly referring to, but really has nothing to do with AAC itself.
The original comparison stands in two cases.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hey... I think I'll have to change my .sig...
Ignore this signature. By order.
Objectives for Introducing a New Still Image Format
Today's file formats for continuous tone images present many limitations in maintaining the highest image quality or delivering the most optimal system performance. Windows Media(TM) Photo was designed to remove these limitations. The design objectives include:
Windows Media(TM) Photo is the only format that offers high dynamic range image encoding, lossless or lossy compression, multiple color formats, and performance that enables practical in-device implementation.
it's widely accepted that the full spec for MS word's doc format is on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard".
Software Freedom Day!.
not agreeing to the license terms on Microsofts site for this results in a web page on something called Microsofts XPS Document format which they claim is an open and cross-platform specification. We all know that MS Cross-Platform means it works across all supported versions of Microsoft Windows but this MS Open xxxxx convention is getting alot of air time these days.
It would be an interesting list to see just how often Microsoft claims one if its products are "open" or names a product/feature with the "open" name...
Microsoft Open Packaging
Microsoft Office Open XML Formats
Microsoft Open License Program
Microsoft Open Volume Licenses
Microsoft Open Academic MS Open License 6.0 Academic Edition
Microsoft Open Database Connectivity ( might be ODBC related and might not count )
Microsoft Open License Value
MICROSOFT OPEN SQL SERVER 2005 ENTERPRISE EDITION
Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Open Text ( included since they seem to be VERY close to MS )
Microsoft Open Source Software Lab ( explains why MS Marketing Corp is using 'open' so much )
There's probably much more but wow, I really didn't think it had gone THIS far.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
No. MP3 is MPEG-1 audio layer 3. It was part of the initial MPEG specification. It was about as good as could be done with the processing power available at the time, but used a fairly primitive psycho-acoustic model and had noticeable artefacts. The MPEG-2 specification introduced an additional way of encoding audio, the Advanced Audio CODEC (AAC), which gave significantly better compression. This was refined (new profiles were added) in MPEG-4. All of these provided significant improvement over the original.
bzip2 serves a different purpose to zip and is more of a pointless replacement for gzip
No. Gzip is a stream compressor. Bzip2 is a block compressor. You can add gzip to a stream with minimal latency. Bzip2 requires blocks of 100-900KB to work with. If you sent an IM session through bzip2, then it would add huge delays. Gzip would not. This is why gzip is used for things like HTTP - you can just add it into the output stream and decompress it at the browser's end. Bzip2, however, gives significantly better compression ratios on files, for precisely the same reason. They do not serve the same purpose (although some people do seem to persist in using gzip as if it were a block compressor).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
1) UNISYS : Microsoft
A) Pitbull : Beelezebub
B) 9mm : Howizter
C) Dog shit : Milwaukee Sewage System
D) All of the above.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
(Oh, and expect PNG support in IE7 to be downgraded)
Actually, this explains why PNG has been crippled for so very long in IE. They didn't want PNG to gain a foothold before they could introduce their unwanted Microsoft version.
I don't know what Microsoft is thinking. Their own image format? That's the last thing they should be introducing right now. This company is full of lunatics.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I read the internet for the articles.
This gives me an interesting idea. What about setting up firefox to provide it's own terms of use as part of the HTTP request header. Something to the effect of "By providing content in response to this HTTP request, you agree to not impose any bullshit terms of use on me."
I can confirm that PNG and MNG both work properly in IE7 Beta.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
I'm not sure how you're using the word circular.
Generally when you're talking about signal processing and you mention a circular transform it means that the transform assumes your last sample and first sample are adjacent... like the old video games where if you flew off the right side of the screen you'd appear back on the left side.
Fourier (and DC) transforms are circular (they're basically circular convolutions). That can obviously lead to artefacts on the edges of the patch you're transforming because the transform is treating that edge as if it were connected to the other edge of the patch when ACTUALLY it's connected to the edge of the next patch over. Because a wavelet uses the equivalent of a window that changes sizes, each frequency has the edge in a different place so there isn't such a break.
Hah, thanks, but I can't get too excited about that. If I did, it would be acknowledging that there was something novel about my comment. But there isn't. Admitedly, when I first saw Fourier series, I thought it was the most interesting math I had yet encountered. Now, that was in no small part due to this guy and his excellent teaching and explanation of Fourier Series. This is really no different than when it was proved by Fourier that any function (for some reasonable definition of any) could be represented as a sum of trig polynomials. It was a *cool* idea. Once you learn that, the DFT is cool, but not as earth shaking. To me, second only to Fourier series in terms of the "wow" factor when learning were wavelets and the associated Discrete Wavelet Transform and Filterbanks. But, one fact remains. Once you learn the DFT or the DCT or the mDCT or the DCT-II or furthermore the DWT, the first most *obvious* question is "Hey, what happens when we start removing frequency components?" And that's what all the lossy algorithms amount to; take a transform, set entries to zero, do some entropy encoding. How this is patentable is beyond me. In fact, this compression scheme is built in to learning Fourier series. Even though the sum in a Fourier series is to infinity, you obviously can't calculate or graph that with infinite precision. But you quickly realize that you only need a few terms. Aside from Gibbs' effect, a few Fourier terms represent a function really well.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
PNG is really only suitable for line art...
Others in this discussion have pointed out that PNG has a truecolor mode as well as the 256 color and lower modes. The only differences I've noticed when I've been working with portraits and landscape photos in PNGs rather than JPGs are