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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."
If you're not discarding data when you're adjusting color-balance and other settings, you're by definition not compressing as much as you possibly can.
For example, if I desaturate a photo I'm throwing away tons of color information. If that color information is still being written to the file, the file isn't as small as it could be.
Aside from that, PNG should have dethroned JPG long ago for the very simple reason that it contains an alpha channel -- but I still see plenty of JPG's.
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I thought PNG was supposed to replace GIF because it can do transparencies and because GIF used to be encumbered by patent issues while PNG was open.
limited uptake as jpeg2000 vs jpg, mp4/wma/ogg vs mp3, png vs gif, etc As opposed to a rapid updake of Pentax's PEF raw format. How many browsers do you know that render that format?
Doesn't do anything tiff can't
If this is the same as the last time around, they've just taken tiff, duplicated a bunch of the baseline tags for no good reason (other than to make it incompatible), added their own codec (which they could have done to tiff very easily), removed a bunch of useful stuff from tiff, and called it their own image format. It's a real hack job.
It's just MS being the MS we've come to know and love so well -- making their own binary formats in the hopes of extending their monopoly.
Ian Ameline
How does MicroSoft intend to license it?
Which raw are you talking about? Is it DNG, PEF or a hundred other proprietary raw formats?
Doesn't matter, the point is that anyone who's dissatisifed with JPG has allready found an alternative.
How many browsers do you know that render that format?
If you'd bothered to read the article before commenting, you would know that support in the camera is the support that matters.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I doubt that Microsoft will make any headway in this. MS is becoming less and less trusted, and if there is a good alternative that already exists and is supported everywhere it will stick. JPG, GIF, RAW, will stay there. MS, is getting more and more pathetic trying to regain there loosing glory of the 1990's. They have been able to get some marginal headway on SQL servers, and some other software. But for data format standards they haven't gotten a good stronghold on a document foothold From office formats.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
No. Next!
Rationale? We already have JPEG for lossy and PNG for lossless and now that GIF is off-patent we have that too. All of these have un-encumbered implementations. Having lossless and lossy in one format doesn't really offer much of an advantage. Unless this new image format gives me time-traveling X-ray vision into whatever the picture is, why should I care? Extra compression is nice, and it might be worthwhile if you were archiving terabytes of image data. Most web sites are not, so even if it has better compression it's still not worth the hassle of switching. Bandwidth and storage are just not that expensive. In other words, it would have to totally blow away the existing formats by some performance metric. I have a hard time believing the ammount of effort to switch things over could be justified. What could possibly be that much better about any new image format? Anyone remember JPEG 2000? The wavelet compression was really interesting, but it was proprietary, somebody was trying to make money off it, and so nobody cared. It's tough to enter a market where the price is already set at ZERO. The existing product in such a market has to be inferior enough so that people are willing to pony up the extra bills. An example of where this has happened in the recent past is the compiler market. People were willing to pay extra for the Intel compiler even though GCC is free, because the Intel compiler generated faster code. It's been a while since I've looked into that, so I don't know if that's still the situation. Even with the performance difference, many people still just stuck with GCC rather than pay more. This is not MS-bashing. It's just basic economics.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I don't see how this would replace jpg in any remote way whatsoever. Where are most images stored and viewed? On the internet and a browser. I need a small, high quality image. I don't need to go visit cnn.com and adjust the tint, hue and color levels of the "breaking news" graphic on their site.
Not to mention, I am highly skeptical of any attempt Microsoft claims to be making toward "standardization".
Why not use LZMA then, which is both faster and has better compression than bzip2?
"Doesn't matter, the point is that anyone who's dissatisifed with JPG has allready found an alternative."
That's not what you said. You said "Not going to end jpg - everyone dissatisfied with JPG is already using RAW." RAW is a camera format, not an output format. No one uses RAW as a replacement for jpeg except during image acquisition.
As for everyone already using alternatives, that may be so but that doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement. This may not be the answer but it's naive to think that the image formats we have now are all there will ever be.
It doesn't do anything new, its licencing is restrictive, nothing yet supports it, and there are (probably superior) alternatives already available. The only way this will take off is with help from Microsoft's famous dodgy business techniques.
It will be widespread within three years. All Microsoft has to do is pressure all consumer digital camera manufacturers into supporting it. Thats easily done - make it a requirement for a 'Certified Windows Vista Compatable' logo. Or just offer a cross-promotional marketing deal.
Is space more valuable than time? CPUs are becoming faster, but storage is becoming cheaper too...
Don't forget that it's no longer just space/time tradeoffs. There's also the network bandwidth tradeoff. And network bandwidth is not on the same kind of curve as CPU's or storage at least for WANs.
Pray, tell us under what legal theory does that hold?
If it were true, then you would not be allowed to distribute or modify any image you created with proprietary software such as Photoshop.
HD is to this decade what turbo was to the '80s and extreme was to the'90s.
What I was seeking to prove was that a requirement to get a TIFF to a news agency would not be a huge hardship as long as the RAW file existed. So if you have a camera incapable of shooting TIFF, you can use Adobe's or Apple's software to automatically convert the RAW file to TIFF.
Is that not pretty much the same as shooting TIFF in the first place, except that you're having Adobe or Apple's software doing the conversion instead of the camera's, and you have more control over the process?
I agree that pro photographers might want to do the conversion with more control. In fact, they would most likely also do similar processing to the TIFF. In fact, starting with RAW gives quite a few more tweaking options and could be a competitive advantage in getting better quality photographs to the news agency.
Did I miss something?
D
Do you want you images subject to Microsoft Licensing the moment you save them? What if Microsoft "upgrades" their "standard" and your 5-10 year old digital photo's can't be viewed anymore (like with older Word documents, but with images it will be worse)?
And look what happened there. WMV was supposed to be the death of MPEG-4/Divx. And the Zune was supposed to be the death of the iPod. They try so hard and always come up short.
I'm sure the format has a boatload of patents associated with it that would preclude it from being used in any open source projects.
Heck, if JPEG2000 and MP3Pro can't catch on, what makes them think this will?
Well.... the whole point of RAW isn't to share files. It's to preserve sensor data EXACTLY as it is received so that it can be processed on a computer, and not on the camera itself. This has numerous advantages, as it is possible to make substantial adjustments to the image without severely compromising image quality.
Because there are various algorithms to do this, it would be downright foolish to send a RAW file to an agency. However, because there's no loss, converting the RAW to a TIFF is trivial, and there's no real reason not to shoot raw unless you don't plan on doing any post-processing. Also, RAW files tend to be smaller than TIFFs when shot on the camera.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
If you are not sure what you can do with TIFF may be you shouldn't knock it, eh? You can use 16 bits per channel in a TIFF. You can also use 64 bit if you really wanted to and to top it off you could make it floating point.
Something like 20 minutes after MS finally releases a browser capable of rendering a transparent PNG correctly (about a decade after the PNG was released), they're gonna' sell us a new and improved graphic format?
Are they completely hopped up on goofballs over there?
Surely the camera manufacturers will be a bit distrustful of an MS format after MS unexpectedly tried to collect money from them for using FAT.
It seems to me that using any new format is very high risk. You do not know what patents may exist on it - not only those held by the deviser of the format (which may be safely covered by a license agreement), but any held by third parties.
Of course even a format that has been around a while may be hit by an unexpected claim (as recently with mp3), but as a format gets olders the lower the risk, and once it has been in use for longer patents last, it is completely safe.
If it's widely supported by browsers, OS's, PDA's, phones, playstations, web tv, photo cd's & dvd's, email apps, [word, excel, powerpoint (& the superior rivals)], printers, print shops, memory card printers & copiers, cameras, ipods & design apps I think it might have a chance.
Since Microsoft won't even be supporting it fully in their own apps (no evidence, but its just obvious right) I don't think it has much chance.
* Game Over * High Score: 264,846,927 -- Your Score: 14
You are obviously not a linguist. Linguists study just this sort of thing. It turns out that just these sort of 'widespread practices' go on all the time in languages. They do not destroy languages. They create new ones, and extend old ones.
Your fear of 'a cesspool of illiteracy' is completely unfounded. It will not happen. You can stop the grammar nazi posts now.
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
I wouldn't use this if you paid me, unless it made me Oprah rich. Anytime Microsoft introduces a file scheme you can be assured they have some hidden agenda behind it. Most likely this will be closed code / format. So, sure you will be able to benefit from all the great features as long as you use Internet Explorer or the like. Whenever Microsoft releases some new product, service, or specification ask yourself what is in it for them? Because the empirical evidence has shown that they have no altruistic motives behind anything they are involved with.
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
You can have mine. I have some ketchup for you if you'd like. Microsoft has one of the best graphics research groups in the world, probably the best. The gold standard for publishing graphics research is Siggraph, and last year they had authors on 18 of the 98 papers. In contrast, MIT faculty had 5, Intel had 2, and AMD/nVidia/ATI had 0. In the world of graphics, MS Research is a powerhouse. You can see the official list of papers here: http://www.siggraph.org/s2006/main.php?f=conferenc e&p=papers
or the entire list on one page:
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~tor/sig2006.html
I certainly don't love MS either, but they have a lot of exceptional graphics people as MS Research.
No, but it's a hell of a lot better than asking Slashdot.
It is simple, the new image format is NOT compatible with the gpl, meaning that once you have chosen that format you will be locked in to using software that supports it. Hmmm, now wich software would that be. Ooh, I know, MS wants you to be locked into OS-X!
Oh, you thinks it is windows. Well I suppose if you are paranoid you could think that MS is trying to introduce a new format that would lock people to its own products by capturing their content.
For this to work MS doesn't have to destroy jpeg at all, it doesn't even have to touch it. It just has to make it that enough people use the new format that it becomes an essential thing.
Just imagine what happens to the web if IE supports this and other browsers can't. Voila, only IE (on windows) can be used to see the whole web. Wanna bet that losts of myspace and other social sites visitors where people upload snaps made with their MS phones would be laden with this new image?
With every thing MS does you simply got to ask yourselve this, "how can this be used to futher tie the user into using MS software exclusively".
If you look at the number of posts here that are about the format rather then the license then even slashdotters are taken in by it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The real question - does it have to be licensed?
.gif and .mp3, and that's what makes those formats something to avoid at almost all costs because you can be sued if you use them without paying the man.
If it does, then it's freaking worthless, no better than if I tried to tell everyone they could write text documents but had to pay me or I'd sue them. Because that's what happened with
There are plenty of perfectly good formats that don't require payment to anyone. USE THEM INSTEAD.
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.
It's trivial to do that: instead of changing the bits, you add a list of transformations to the image header. Trouble is: when such a format comes from Microsoft, they will have numerous patents on it and Microsoft will use those aggressively to maintain their monopoly. It doesn't matter that it's obvious how to do this. It doesn't matter that they weren't the first to invent it.
The world does need a better alternative to JPEG, but it must not come from Microsoft. The FOSS world should instead repeat what happened with PNG and Ogg: create an open, patent-unencumbered format.