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

Would you want your images succeptable to GPL

[cybrthng]

The moment you save them?

Some licenses are best meant to preserve the orginal work of art, not enforce the shared derivitaves thereof.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

As a Mac fanboy and regular poster, I *really* wish you'd learn to spell the word whiny

Both spellings are correct. Sorry.

PS. Why too gutless to login to ask this question?

Re:Vista supports 128 bit internal rendering of gf

[nrgy]

What are you talking about most video cards only support 8 bits per channel? Your whole post stinks of some MS fan boy trying to hide the fact he is one, this added by the fact you clearly know nothing of what your talking about. Your blatant lack of knowledge in anything relating to bit depth, compression and other file formats leaves me to wonder why you would even post on such a response. You obviously have never worked with OpenGL, DX, or anything relating to graphics programing/graphics cards.

Heres two tips that will hopefully help pull you away from being an ignorant moron in posts you know nothing about.

1: Go read on graphics cards and bit depths. "Hint: If they only supported 8 bits then wtf is HDR doing in the Half Life 2 engine?"
2: Go read up on OpenEXR and while your doing that read on its compression schemes. And that being said ILM never made OpenEXR to replace anything other then to fix a problem that existed in their pipeline during that period of time.

Re:Nup, No, Nada.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

And, the ultimate test: Google returns more than twice as many hits for "whiny" as it does for "whiney."

I don't doubt it. There's more than twice as many American English speakers as other English speakers.

Looks right to me.

And who cares if you're off topic & modded down? Do you like my current sig/diary?

Re:PNG with bzip2 compression?

[bzipitidoo]

PNG with bzip2 is not worth it. PNG restarts the compression on each row. Compressing with PNG is like chopping a 1000000 byte file into 1000 files of 1000 bytes each, and then compressing the pieces separately. The method used in bzip2 works best on large chunks of data-- all the data in one big chunk if you can manage it. At 1000 bytes per chunk, bzip2 and gzip compress about equally well. At even smaller sizes, gzip is often better.

bzip2 on the raw image data actually competes very well with PNG. Sometimes PNG is better, and sometimes "raw.bz2" is better.

And yes, transforming the data before applying a compression algorithm is best of all. PNG actually does do that. A real simple transform (which PNG uses) that can help a lot is just feeding the difference between adjacent pixels to the compressor, rather than the pixel values themselves. For instance, bzip2 compresses the color version of the famous Lena image (512x512x24) to about 585k. But if you feed it the differences between adjacent pixel values, the compressed size drops to 512k. Another very easy change takes you quite a bit further. Rotate the image 90 degrees, then do the difference between adjacent pixels, and then compress with bzip2. Final result will be around 475k.

So why doesn't PNG do these things? The designers were interested in more than compression. They wanted to accomodate slow connections by making it possible to see some of an image without having to download the entire thing. They wanted a bit more robustness, so that a few bad bytes wouldn't make the entire image undecodable. However, it does seem like those are not the problems they were 10 or 15 years ago, not with it becoming possible to fling an entire movie's worth of data over the Internet in a few minutes, or carry the same around on one DVD. Now you don't mess around with some error checking protocol like zmodem in case you get a few bad bytes. Instead you have your browser reload the whole thing if there's some problem that gets past TCP/IP. So maybe MS is right in that it's time to update our image formats. But MS is stupid if they think they can make something that is enough better than PNG and JPEG that people will feel it's worth the cost of moving to a proprietary, patented, locked down, and mostly unsupported format.