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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."
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.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I predict it will succeed in displacing jpg just like png displaced both gif and jpg.
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.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
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.
JPEG and PNG are fine, if we want a HDR capable lossless image format we'll use OpenEXR (No George, we still don't forgive you for Jar Jar). Why do Microsoft have to keep re-inventing the wheel? OpenEXR has mad force powers, Microsoft image formats smell like Ballmers toe nail clippings. What have they patented or what DRM switch and bait are Microsoft trying to pull with this move?
The PNG format uses the DEFLATE compression algorithm to minimize its data size. DEFLATE is the same compression method used by gzip. We all know that for larger files, the bzip2 compression utility tends to obtain better compression ratios than gzip. So would it not be possible to use the bzip2 algorithm instead of DEFLATE when compressing the image data, to obtain a smaller image file size at the cost of greater compression and decompression times?
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.
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
PNG was not supposed to replace JPEG; it was supposed to replace GIF. Unfortunately, thanks to massive delays in getting PNG support correctly working in IE, that never happened. Also, some people still insist they need animated GIFs, which PNG doesn't do (see MNG, which is nowhere). It's sad, as for most file sizes of images appropriate for GIF, PNG was way smaller (unless you get way, WAY small, as in under 150bytes or so (not kilobytes, BYTES). Also, Adobe is still unable to provide decent compression on the PNGs its software generates, so to this day, you need compression tools like pngout or pngcrush (pngout usually produces smaller files). Weird that you can still lossly compress a lossy image, but whatever.
This won't be the end of anything unless it is unemcumbered by patents, and as a previous poster noted, it isn't. So, this is a non-event.
Perhaps the group that came up with PNG can come up with a patent-free replacement for JPEG?
How does MicroSoft intend to license it?
this is the same story with windows media..
the lesson is: the looser the licensing terms (while still maintaining an actual standard), the more widely used it will be.
this means microsft, sony, and real can keep scrambling to their hearts content, but they wont touch a majority share when they treat formats like this.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
It applies to the code
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
If JPEG can't develop a standard to effectively replace JPEG (JPEG2000) then I really don't see much hope for Microsoft in doing so.
"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.
Some licenses are best meant to preserve the orginal work of art, not enforce the shared derivitaves thereof.
Do you believe that your documentswill be subjected to MS's licensing terms when you save them in word? Of course not.
The GPL does not cover works created using GPLd tools. Learn the difference between code & content.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
displays for sure!
You can have my SIG when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
there are plenty of formats out there that are better than JPEG, and yet only the popular will continue to live on.
...actually flash could probably be the good combo format, but it's hard to get designers to output flash that doesn't have some form of retarded movement in it.
There used to be a direct JPEG competitor (wave based raster compression) called 'Lightning Strike' or something... you could actually control the level of compression by an alpha channel. That way, like a portrait, you could keep the face in sharp detail without loss, and the rest will be compressed to heck leaving a file size and compression truly in the hands of the person making the file.
But it's not even about file size... in many instances, if you want a lossless image just the plain 'PSD' photoshop is by far the best. Many times I've had to send large images for adverts, and just used the flat PSD image as it was the smallest file size and obviously no loss in quality.
The image format war is just about popularity... which is why Gif has lasted through everything even though PNG is just as good and more open. New image formats will actually have to do something new for them to gain any traction at all... a pervasive vector and raster combination image should have been available by now and renderable in browsers. There's EPS, but we need browsers to support these things if they're going to get anywhere for the web... anything else but end users saying "fantastic, I really need to get that" just wont have a hope.
And while it's kind of on the topic, something like MetaStream should have been pervasive by now... along with LightningStrike, there's another "should have been awesome" product. *sigh*
But with JPEG being everywhere, the JVM's, the server solutions, the just-about-freaking-everything... there is no way MS can even think of threatening JPEG. It's just absurd to think they can.
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"?
In reality, this doesn't mean anything, because there's insufficient information in the linked article.
Microsoft, just like any other vendor on the planet, is free to submit anything they like into standards bodies, and ask that they be accepted or considered for use in the world. If Microsoft's new format is useful, fantastic, we all should start using it.
But if, and only if, that format comes free from the burden of licensing or copyright. We've seen how damaging these restrictions can be to simple file format (remember ARC? And all the fun that went on with GIF?) - If Microsoft is releasing an idea for folks to use and adopt? Excellent. If they're pushing an internal format that they hold a patent on, and are requesting other vendors to adopt it? Then it's simply Microsoft once again trying to dick over the industry. And I can't see how it can possibly work under those circumstances.
They don't have the big stick they used to. This is no longer 2000, where the corporate juggernaut simply needed to wave it's financial might and the net doth tremble before it. Microsoft has to tread carefully on an increasingly powerful free software world.
We'll see how this goes. Me, I'm waiting to hear more information.
Event Management Solutions : http://www.stonekeep.com/
For more information on 'HD Photo' (damn I hate that name), check the blog at:
http://blogs.msdn.com/billcrow/
Hasn't been updated in a good while, but contains plenty of nice information. The various bitdepth storages alone make it an 'interesting' format if nothing else - though I'm sticking with EXR.. just a shame that doesn't offer lossy compression much yet - but then.. that's not its' purpose.
Yeah right. When was the last time a proprietary Microsoft format overtook a reigning defacto standard? I also didn't see anything in the article that indicated technology licensing fees. Given that it's Microsoft, I'm pretty sure they're going to charge for it. If they don't, they will once enough people start adopt it. After all, this is Microsoft we're talking about, guys.
Actually, never mind Microsoft. Let's look at the audio arena. The royalty-free OGG format should have bumped off MPG, but still device manufacturers are all too happy to pay Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft to use MP3. In fact, it's still hard to find devices that support OGG at all. The moral of the story is that it's really hard to get anyone to commit development costs to support a new standard, let alone beat out one that's widely supported, even if you are giving away the tech for free.
-R
No.
Formerly GNU/Anonymous Coward. This message has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.
Sure, the GPL FAQ explains this sort of thing:
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Well, this very web page you're staring at is a good example.
I count 21 PNG files and 2 GIF files.
Oh, absolutely! That's why I use PNG where image quality is absolutely required, even if JPG saves much smaller normally - at the highest quality levels, it actually fares worse!
:|
What I meant was within the context of supporting transparency - PNG supports nice multiple levels of transparency, which was a huge boon over GIF if you have to deal with transparency. Sadly, IE 6 and below didn't support it right, which made it less attractive. So the huge advantage there was basically nixed.
Though, there's no good reason not to use PNG with transparency anyway. There's a few hacks out there, including automatic ones (javascript iterating over all PNG images, replacing them in-line with new ones that use a directx display filter), that are perfecly safe to use. But the damage was already done, I daresay. Hopefully IE7 is slowly changing that, but if MS pushes this format enough.. bleh
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.
I think, in part, you're confusing patents and copyright (for example, your discussion of MP3s), and I think, in part, you're trying to extrapolate the GPL as if it were copyright law.
So, let's step back a bit and try to untangle exactly what's going on. When you use a codec, you're using a piece of software. The codec itself is protected under copyright and possibly under patents. In any event, the actions the codec carries out are not in themselves creative. By this, I mean, the transformations are deterministic with an intended output; creativity could be said to be non-deterministic (ie, originality) with an intended output. Copyright only extends to works that are the result of a creative process. To that end, nothing a codec does could itself be copyrighted; if it could be, the codec itself would be the copyright owner, not the writer of the codec; of course, such a codec would seemingly fill the requirements of a partial AI, so I think the concerns of copyright would not exactly be high on the list of discussion.
Having said all that, we get into the issue of something like the MP3 codec. The concern with it, as related to the GPL, has more to do with the GPL having provisions about patents. Patents, as you likely know, apply to a process, not a specific implementation. This, of course, can be a huge issue with something like the GPL because a large point of the GPL is to allow for the redistribution of GPLed code. If only some people were allowed to legally redistribute the code, by paying patent royalties, then the "network" of involvement to improve GPLed code would be a lot less webbed and a lot more hierarchical (or, it'd be a lot more illegal). Because of this, the GPL requires that all distributed code that implements a patent include royalty-free redistribution covering that patent. Because the MP3 code is patented and there is no royalty-free redistribution allowed (no matter what is said about trying to include an exception for open source), gpled mp3 codecs are illegal, if for no other reason than the distributor of the gpled code is granting others a privilege he doesn't have.
Having said all that, there's nothing illegal about the mp3 format or inherently legal about mp3s themselves. But given the fact that you can't include an mp3 encoder or decoder with a totally GPL software distribution, MP3s have been frowned upon in the free/open software world. On top of that, of course, is the excessive piracy of music (and note, this is further proof that codecs don't change copyright; if they did, the codec maker would be the one suing over all the CD->MP3ed music, not the RIAA and its members) in MP3 format, as it was the first to make it readily possible to share music (commercial and otherwise) over the internet that has basically made MP3 synonymous with pirated music. The last thing many in the free software world want is to have the appearance that the GPL is all about "getting free (as in beer) stuff", even if it's through illegal means.
PS - Things like the gcc include an exception about the GPL not applying as a result of using gcc to compile a program precisely to avoid confusion over the issue; this is somewhat humorous as there are many places were a transformation application of one sort or another will copy small fragments of itself into the destination application, which you seem to recognize. The one overriding principle to always remember is that copyright applies first. The GPL is subordinate to the rules of copyright. So is every other, proprietary license. Now, if you wanted something with more fuzzy lines, one could discuss the linking of libraries. But, that's a whole other discussion.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
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.
Please help metamoderate.
HD is to this decade what turbo was to the '80s and extreme was to the'90s.
JP2000 was not lossless. It was just giving beter quality than JPEG at the same size ( think MPEG2 -> H.264 ).
c s_file_formats
However JPEG 2000 is a pain to compress and render and is not a 'free format'. (also try to encode/render JPEG2000 images: unless you have a new Intel QuadCore you will feel the suffering of your machine. )
With this HD Format, Microsoft says their algorithm comes close to JPEG2000 quality/size but with a very simple algo.
Also Microsoft is making a lot of effort to standardise their stuff ( they tried first to license it for free, now they go to a standardisation process ). They also have the support of Adobe, which is not a bad thing when talking about image format.
A strong point for HD-Format is that it covers the quality and feature range from JPEG-2000 to TIFF-Losless. So camera manufacturer could benefit from unified chipset that works from pocket camera to SLR. Or a flexible SLR chipset that cover the whole range of quality the user wishes.
But anyway, good source of information as usual: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_graphi
I agree. In geospatial technologies (e.g. satellite imagery, aerial photography, GIS, topography, etc.) the GeoTIFF format is commonly used for georeferenced raster data. Additionally, the BigTIFF format proposal comes to the rescue to circumvent TIFF's 4 gigs maximum size.
Animoog.org
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?
I believe it will be here where it will be met with stiff resistance
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Microsof'ts HD Photo format is a forward looking codec. Vista can support future displays that will have wider gamuts and high dynamic range. Right now most video cards only support 8 bits per channel for color (24 bit, the other 8 bits are for alpha channels, meaning that it can quickly apply color effects efficiently).
It is possible that in 2009, people will be buying wide gamut, high dynamic range displays in numbers, so it will become evident that the old graphic file formats aren't going to look as good anymore. HD Photo can fill that need by having the high bit rate for more expressive colors, as well as offering compression comparable to JPEG so that it can be used online. It also offers the flexiblity to trade files uncompressed for maximum detail.
I suppose everyone can use a format like OpenEXR for high bit info, but I don't think it compresses as well as HD Photo.
Nevertheless, I am going to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt that they're not going to sue people for decoding HD Photo. However, I don't know how flexible they will be with people encoding it. I think now the general industry has wisened up to close formats and now will consider open formats from now on.
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.
Before slamming the format, please read more about it. Regardless of what you think about Microsoft, I think it has great potential. Some highlights:
Also, take a look at http://labs.live.com/photosynth and http://blogs.msdn.com/billcrow. To quote one thing from his blog:
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!
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 am talking about the communication from the OS to the videocard to the display.
Before Windows Vista, the OS was limited to 8 bits per channel (RGB) OUTPUT for the video card. The video card will only get 8 bit of data per channel from the OS, so even if you have a nice ATI card that can do 10 bit per channel (RGB) output from the port, it's still being fed 8bpc data.
Cards from Matrox that can output 10 bit grayscale for 10 bit monochrome displays use DirectX and special drivers to overcome this limitation. Matrox video cards also support 10bpc in Photoshop using a special plugin/driver. However, you have to run the plugin and switch away from the Photoshop interface to see the extra bit of colors.
I know that OpenGL can do high bit rendering, like in the case of the nVidia Quadro cards, or just using floating point representation. The Quardo uses 128 bit precision for all the fancy 3d effects. However what you're seeing on screen is limited by 8bpc output of your video card (though a quadro supports 12 bit output)
Windows Vista supports 128 bit at the OS level. That means you can have a video card that can output 10bpc (for 30 bits total) and it will contain real information that let's say a nice HDTV can read (using HDMI). Or you can just open a regular RGBA image (32 bits) and using a some sort of 3d program to do fancy compositing using different textures and store the information in 128 bit (or the lesser formats; look at MSDN for the various encoding schemes) for speed.
The point is, Vista has the headroom to really display images that contain more than 8bpc (RGB). I'm hoping that Linux would follow suit (it will once HDR displays become commercialy viable) and I believe Mac OS X Leopard will also have this high bit output support (though I have not found any evidence of that yet.)
I'll preface this by saying that on the topic of file and data formats in general, I am intensely conservative. I think it's ridiculous to switch to a new format or compression scheme, unless the benefits are massive -- in particular I've never understood people who seem to gleefully parade from one file compression system to the next every few years, abandoning perfectly good and well-understood formats for ones that don't have decent, widely-available reference implementations; but I digress -- but I'm rather bullish on DNG.
I don't know whether Adobe will pull it off, but I hope that it succeeds, or at least survives.
TIFF is a huge mess. Let's face it; it's a gigantic cockup. Anyone can write TIFF files, but they're nearly impossible to "read" in the sense that a user is going to expect: if I say that my application will "read TIFFs," they're going to expect that anything with a TIF extension is going to get read. And that's almost never the case; you can pack just too much stuff into the container.
(Although container formats have a certain elegance to them from a geek perspective, I'm not sure they're all they're cracked up to be. The number of times I've gotten a video file that I don't have a codec for, but have no way of knowing about until I try to open it, because the codec is concealed inside the MOV or AVI container, or similar problems with TIFs, is beyond number. There's some good sense in eliminating container formats, or at least tying the file extension and other metadata, not to the container, but to the codec inside.)
What I hope that Adobe can do, is give us some neutral ground that the various camera manufacturers can agree to use, so we can break away from the per-manufacturer RAW file formats, and the TIFF morass for interchange.
DNG already has support in probably the biggest single application of consequence, and that's Photoshop, and now they've got quite a few camera manufacturers on board, and the specification is open so there are FOSS implementations. Ed Hamrick's excellent VueScan scanning software produces them, too, and perhaps SilverFast will join the party sometime soon. If they can get the middle-market of consumer and prosumer cameras on board, then I think it will have a chance at achieving dominance from the imaging sensors on down the chain.
There's a lot to be said for it; anyone can implement it, but at the same time, there's some centralized control over the format, so that every Tom, Dick, and Harry can't build on their own crappy extension to the format and create the sort of Balkanization that's plagued TIFF. Hopefully, this will mean that people can implement it, and be confident that if they say that their app will 'read DNG,' that it will actually read all the various types of DNG files that users will throw at it.
If that's the only thing that DNG did, it would be a huge step forward.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
"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 rest of your post is suspect now, of course.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.
Yeah right. End of JPEG. As if.
It may simply become the "other format" supported on every camera (alongside JPEG, RAW or even TIFF) the same way Ogg is the "other format" supported on MP3 players (also supporting WMA, AAC). I doubt they have wild new technology in there that will make it hard to support all of them at once.
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.
Where's Adobe? What do they have to say? They created Photoshop and the PDF format. If anyone should be making a new image format it should be them. Hell maybe even Apple should do it since they did Quicktime. What did MS do? PAINT? Sheesh
'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.
Since you claim expertise in this area and make some arguments that are, on the surface, convincing I feel it is important to point out mistakes in your arguments. Mistakes that even a relatively raw beginner such as myself are aware of. It appears that you have a very high level understanding of RAW, but to extend this into an understanding of the internals is a dangerous thing to do on Slashdot. First of all, since you speak of Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Pentax 'raw', I think you do understand that each of these formats are unique. The original poster is correct that some manufacturers (e.g. Sony) actually encrypt some of the data in their RAW format so that (for instance) the white balance can only be extracted using proprietary software. It may not be "a Sh!7l0ad of smaller manufacturers" from your point of view, but since I've seen relatively inexpensive Sony, Canon, Pentax and (the dearly departed) Minolta cameras spit out what their marketing material claims is "raw". The bottom line is that RAW is like tiff, only worse in that the data, data representation (byte order...), encoder and container may change from manufacturer to manufacturer. The only thing Canon RAW and Sony RAW are certain to have in common is that their marketing material, instruction book and camera's menu uses the three letters 'R', 'A', and 'W' to represent the name of the format (or in some cases 'r', 'a', 'w'. For a close look at the internals of many raw formats, I suggest you look at the source code to Dcraw. A few other mistakes, even really cheap webcams don't encode to gif (I don't know where that comment came from but they don't, the closed driver software takes the "raw" CMOS/CCD data and encodes it to GIF without letting the user see the raw data. If you're into astrophotography or have used a webcam on an opensource operating system, you'll understand more. Also, the raw file may be the closest consumers can come to the CCD's internal format, but by no means does is it identical to the RAW CCD data as it comes out of the CCD's analog light buckets (or CMOS gates) into the A/D.