Microsoft Move to be the End of JPEG?

jcatcw writes "Microsoft Corp. will submit a new photo format to an international standards organization. The format, HD Photo (formerly known as Windows Media Photo), can accommodate lossless and lossy compression. Microsoft claims that adjustments can be made to color balance and exposure settings that won't discard or truncate data that occurs with other bit-map formats."

Comments

Nup, No, Nada.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Not going to end jpg - everyone dissatisfied with JPG is already using RAW. Everyone satisified with jpg will stick with jpg.

This is going to enjoy the same sort of limited uptake as jpeg2000 vs jpg, mp4/wma/ogg vs mp3, png vs gif, etc.

Few other things to note:

1) The 'HD' doesn't stand for High Definition, it's just there to get the association with HD TV in consumers minds. *rolls eyes*

2) This technology is patented to the hilt & the licensing terms for the HD Photo Device Porting Kit 1.0 licensing terms specifically exclude copyleft (GPL style) licenses.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[dedazo]

everyone dissatisfied with JPG is already using RAW

Actually, in the context of digital photography (which I assume is what you're talking about here, though JPEG is of course not limited to that) "everyone" uses TIFF. Just try to do freelance for a news agency and watch how quickly they ask you for TIFF files, which only the high-end cameras can generate.

I suppose some of the smaller shops or newspapers and whatnot do use RAW, but for Reuters et.al if it's not TIFF you're not getting a paycheck. The same goes for the big stock photography companies and so on.

PNG is no replacement for JPG

[Animaether]

PNG is a replacement for GIF, if anything. JPG files are much smaller than PNG files for typical photographs (though can be smaller for line art and the like), which will always leave JPG as the favorite much like FLAC isn't replacing MP3 anytime soon. The alpha channel in PNG is absolutely a nice perk, but thanks to the dim people at Microsoft never supporting it right until IE7, there wasn't much benefit over using GIF files. (Even though PNG did bi-level transparency just as fine as GIF files - even better, you didn't lose 1 palette entry - but that as an aside.)

If you want a JPG replacement - a la OGG Vorbis over MP3 - try JPEG2000 or the lurawave stuff based on wavelets.

RAW?

[Animaether]

"Everyone dissatisfied with JPG is already using RAW"?

I don't know where you're getting that statement from. Everybody dissatisfied with JPG - which I can only imagine stems from the fact that it is lossy compression - is either using:
PNG - because it's common, free to use, etc. etc.
EXR - because it'll allow you to store whatever the hell you want
GIF - because it's ubiquitious and is free to use nowadays (not that too many people cared a few years ago)

'RAW' isn't used by anybody. 'RAW' does not exist. 'RAW' is a collective name for a shitload of formats by a smaller shitload of digital camera companies. And it is never "RAW".. it is never raw data.. it's compressed, stored integratedly or separately, encrypted or not (SONY, among other) and contains a bunch of camera data. The closest thing to a "RAW" format is, say, PFM (portable/pixel float map) or any other format that just stores every color(group) as a bunch of bytes in a long chunk with minimal to zero header/footer information whatsoever that you can only open if you know things like bitdepth and dimension. The closest thing to a unified 'RAW' format for cameras is Adobe's DNG (Digital Negative) - and that's finding slow (no?) adoption as it is. And the closest thing to a unified non-'RAW' format for cameras that isn't lossy compressed is TIFF. None of which you can toss on a website and make viewable in any of the major browsers without plugin installation (if even available!)

That said, I agree with all your other points, especially point 1. Microsoft should be kicked even when down for jumping on the HD bandwagon with a product (or format) that has nothing whatsoever to do with HD.

Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data

[ceoyoyo]

No. Documents you create with OO.org aren't all GPLed either. The GPL specifically applies to code. You own the copyright to anything you create, even if you use someone else's program to do it. Now, if you use someone else's work and modify it, such as modifying a GPLed program, THEN you have to abide by their copyright wishes.

RAW versus "raw", and other major errors...

[SuperBanana]

I don't know where you're getting that statement from. Everybody dissatisfied with JPG - which I can only imagine stems from the fact that it is lossy compression - is either using: (PNG, GIF, EXR.)

You don't understand what "raw" images are used for. They're used PURELY in the acquisition phase. There isn't a (non-webcam/hideously-dumbed down) camera in the world that records to GIF, I don't know of a single camera on the market that records to PNG, and EXR is a very specialized format used mostly in "film" (ie movie production.) No still digital cameras on the market record to it.

'RAW' isn't used by anybody. 'RAW' does not exist. 'RAW' is a collective name for a shitload of formats by a smaller shitload of digital camera companies.

No, it's not. RAW = Canon's "raw" image format. "Raw" image formats are produced by many higher-end digital cameras. I'm sorry you don't understand the distinction between RAW and raw, but it does make it painfully obvious this isn't your area of expertise. It is mine: I've shot RAW images on my Canon dSLR for fun and profit for several years now. I shoot exclusively in RAW format because of the extra bit depth which makes adjustments much more 'transparent' (a level adjustment won't cause as much problems wit 10-12 bit data as it will with 8 bit, and you also have no compression artifacts.) I archive everything in the original Canon RAW format.

Your characterization that "raw" formats are used by a "shitload of smaller digital camera companies" is also completely wrong. Canon's RAW and Nikons's NEF are by far the largest, most commonly used "raw" formats. Phase1 is probably up there with their digital camera backs. I'm now guessing, but Fuji is probably next (Fuji dSLRs were very popular a few years back, in part because the Fuji SuperCCD was superior to almost everything else on the market at the time), followed by Panasonic/Leica, followed by Pentax.

Many point-and-shoot consumer cameras these days are incapable of shooting in a RAW mode; it's left to the "prosumer" models by most manufacturers.

And it is never "RAW".. it is never raw data.. it's compressed, stored integratedly or separately, encrypted or not (SONY, among other) and contains a bunch of camera data.

It most certainly is raw image sensor data; that's the whole point. "Raw" camera formats all use LOSSLESS compression. Yes, all of them contain incredibly useful EXIF-like data in them. This is not, despite your rant, a negative to anyone I know. Few manufacturers encrypt the data; Nikon encrypts the white balance info on one or two models (which happen to be the several-thousand-dollar professional digital SLR bodies.)

In most cameras (certainly the Canons and Nikons), it is, in fact, "raw"; it represents the closest you can get to the original sensor data, with little or no processing (on Canon cameras, I believe they don't even do thermal noise subtraction prior to writing the RAW file; the file even contains the "dead" area of the sensor used for such compensation), and anywhere from 10 to 12 bits per channel precision. No white balance, brightness/contrast, gamma, or sharpening adjustments are applied before the data is recorded.

Read the Wikipedia article

[cooldev]

Before slamming the format, please read more about it. Regardless of what you think about Microsoft, I think it has great potential. Some highlights:

• High dynamic range
• Embedded ICC color profile
• Lossy and lossless compression
• Ability to decode part of the image without decoding the whole thing (see below)
• Ability to crop, downsample (i.e. thumbnails), and rotate without decoding the whole image
• Very efficient encoding and decoding, useful not only on the desktop, but also specifically designed for fast encoding and decoding on devices like digital cameras
• High quality and small file size. (Around half the file size as JPEG (or) twice the quality. Claimed to be similar to JPEG 2000 without the additional performance and memory impact.)
• TIFF-like container
• The licence for the format *is* supposedly compatible with the GPL; only the source code for the reference implementation is not.

Also, take a look at http://labs.live.com/photosynth and http://blogs.msdn.com/billcrow. To quote one thing from his blog:

Because this is a compressed domain operation, the server never had to decode or re-encode the compressed data to create this low resolution "thumbnail" of the larger, high resolution image. The only work involved was to copy a portion of the compressed data and wrap it up in a container to make a new HD Photo file. This very small HD Photo file is sent across the network connection, and then decoded by the HD Photo codec on the client to provide the low resolution view required for the particular display.

When zooming in to the fine details of a high resolution image, the HD Photo codec is able to very quickly extract an arbitrary rectangular region by accessing only the image tiles that overlap that region. Like the mipmaps described above, this is accomplished by simply extracting a small portion of the compressed data and building a new (and very small) HD Photo file to be sent across the network. The client receives and decodes this small file, combining it with the other segments required to display the required view.

IMHO this seems like a well-balanced format that has most of the advantages of a cornucopia of different formats (JPEG, JPEG 2000, RAW, TIFF) without the corresponding disadvantages. If it's not successful, I at least hope something equivalent is!

Wrong.

[linuxmop]

"PNG restarts the compression on each row"

That is absolutely not true, and would be madness if it were. From the specification, section 4.5.5:

The sequence of filtered scanlines in the pass or passes of the PNG image is compressed (see figure 4.10) by one of the defined compression methods. The concatenated filtered scanlines form the input to the compression stage. The output from the compression stage is a single compressed datastream.

The rest of your post is suspect now, of course.

Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data

[mgiuca]

It applies to the code

But patents extend to user data. HD Photo is heavily patented. The wiki says basically, "it's patented, but MS promises not to sue anybody who uses it but doesn't put it under the GPL."

itsatrap.