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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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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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Well, I clicked the "I do not agree" button, and it still takes you through to the details...
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
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.
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.
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.
MNG does all of those, IIRC.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
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.
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.
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.
Jpeg2000 supports both lossy and lossless compression, and a variety of wavelet-based compression schemes that work better than normal JPEG.
Unfortunately, no-one supports Jpeg2000.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
...and pretty much useless for photos, unless one is happy with very large files.
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.
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.
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.
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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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).
"Since it's a MS format, presumably the codec will be embedded within the OS and will have an easy hook to read/write the format from any program..."
don't forget the hooks to allow an image to format your hard-drive/ run executables as root and maybe even give it facilities to copy your secure account/bank details and mail them out.
---- There are 10 types of people in the world. Those that understand binary and those that don't
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?
Plus, I think that JPEG 2000 is still under the threat of patent litigation. Too bad, because lossless JPEG 2000 files are a lot smaller than similar TIFFs.
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
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.
Hey... I think I'll have to change my .sig...
Ignore this signature. By order.
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!.
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).
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