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Microsoft's HD Photo to Become JPEG Standard?
Mortimer.CA writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft has submitted their HD Photo to the JPEG committee: 'Microsoft's ongoing attempt to establish its own photo format as a JPEG alternative (and potential successor) took another step forward today when the JPEG standards group agreed to consider HD Photo (originally named Windows Media Photo) as a standard. If successful, the new file standard will be known as JPEG XR.' Microsoft has made a 'commitment to make its patents that are required to implement the specification available without charge.' While JPEG 2000 exists, HD Photo has several advantages (not the least of which is a lot less CPU power is needed). Is this a big of an issue as ODF/OOXML?"
They've made what appears to be a legally binding promise they aren't going to dick people over this one using their Open Specification Promise. Whereas the OOXML vs. ODF debate has good grounding in one specification being lower quality than the other, HDPhoto really is an improvement over current formats, especially for handling raw images.
Direct away from face when opening.
Microsoft's license for OOXML, for instance, does not include a patent license; only a promise not to sue, so long as your implementation only uses the necessary portions of details described in the specification, and not details referenced by the specification. IOW, to create an OOXML document importer or exporter, you end up recreating a lot of Microsoft code that isn't covered.
y zing_the_m.html for example.
So 1) you can't use code based on the specification in a GPL V2 or GPL V3 program, because you can't satisfy the patent clause, and 2) you can't write any program based on the specification, because Microsoft only promises not sue you for implementing the specification, not for any supporting code that you would need to write to implement the specification.
See http://fussnotes.typepad.com/plexnex/2007/01/anal
My blog
One of the requirements of the JPEG comittee for this proposed standard is that Microsoft (and all other participants of this process) provide their patents on a free and non-discriminatory basis. Free as in beer, no money. Non-discriminatory meaning that anyone can license them; Microsoft can't say that only certain developers are "cool enough" or "good enough" to receive a license. Many of the JPEG standards operate under these terms: the baseline process of the original JPEG, JPEG2000 part 1, and others.
It just so happens I am planning an HD Image product, service or technology and the spec is totally hostile to everyone BUT microsoft. (no surprise there)
...You may not (i) duplicate any part of these Materials
1. 1. You may review these Materials only (a) as a reference to assist You in planning and designing Your product, service or technology ("Product") to interface with a Microsoft product, specification, service or technology
Mac/Linux/BSD? Nope. So, that appears to rule out web-based stuff. Fortunately, I'm only working on Windows, so I'll read on.
Okay I won't. But how does my engineering group work with the spec if I can't duplicate it?
any Feedback you voluntarily provide may be used in Microsoft Products
Okay, I won't provide any feedback. It was once believed that developers were Microsoft's focus. Apparently not anymore.
Without going into specifics because the EULA prevents it, there are proprietary elements hidden inside this spec.
It's clear they are *very* late to the pro-photo fight that is on now between Apple and Adobe. Each of those companies has a proprietary "pro photo" format.
Sadly most pro photographers won't think about the consequences of adopting proprietary formats until it is too late. For example, some legacy proprietary raw images as provided by the camera manufacturers are not backward compatible. I've read it in the mailing lists already.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
You won't get to CMYK or 32 bits per channel from a source image and if you're sane then you won't ever store this image (unless you're exporting for a print fun), you'll store the sequence of transforms on the original image. Destructive editing is a quaint idea, but not a good one.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Though it almost makes we want to spit my coffee, I have to say that I do not see anything evil here... yet. Quite the contrary, it would seem on first blush. An RF grant is pretty clearcut, see the big discussion about that leading up to the famous W3 decision to require RF grants for all new web standards.
Still, there are still ways to game an RF grant, for example, nothing stops Microsoft from supporting slightly off-standard formats in its own software and refusing to grant an RF license covering those changes to other implementors, using the argument that the original RF grant does not cover any extensions. I suppose the big question is, are other implementors free to extend the format also or does the RF grant evaporate as soon as an implementor extends the standard, perhaps in an effort to match Microsoft's own extensions? In which case the playing field would be far from level, and we have seen all too many times what happens when Microsoft manages to tilt the playing field. I simply haven't drilled into this enough to know what is true here, and no doubt, close readers will find other aspects of the grant to worry about.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
PNG was always intended to replace GIF and be a "better GIF than GIF." PNG is also a more-than-adequate replacement for most common TIFF variants, because you can do almost everything that TIFF can do, but with less complexity (fewer choices for implementation, simpler format, and no optional format features you can't live without that some readers may choose to ignore) and less ambiguity in the spec. The less ambiguity bit is important, since the TIFF spec's ambiguity is one of the main reasons that TIFF files written by one application may not be readable by another application -- even if both apps support the same TIFF extensions.
PNG has compression -- it uses deflate (LZ77 + Huffman coding) instead of GIF's formerly-patent-encumbered LZW algorithm. The key here is lossless compression, so unlike bog-standard JPEG, PNG images are great for archiving exact image data. Radiologists like the fact that PNG can store grayscale images with 16-bit-per-pixel accuracy, in complete image fidelity.
Yes, PNG has better alpha channel support than GIF (although it has a special palette-based transparency feature similar to GIF89's transparency, mainly to ease the transition from GIF to PNG). It also has a better interlacing scheme, for progressive rendering of images when your data pipe is constrained. Set-top-box developers like this feature.
Where PNG fails with high def photos and the like is the lack of floating point representation of pixel data, which limits the kind of High Dynamic Range stuff you can do with it. PNG has chunk types which can contain many of the kinds of meta-data that you would care about for digital photography and scanned artwork, but much of the reader code out there does nothing with this meta-data.
Actually, PNG doesn't support animation at all. The animated sister format is MNG. Animated GIFs are kind of a poor animation format anyway, but they're great for small-size effects on web pages. MNG support in browsers is non-existent, so this has paradoxically limited PNG's uptake (and made GIF more difficult to kill).
I already addressed this issue in a sibling comment to yours, but I figured I'd address this specific point here (as I'm one of the authors of the PNG spec).
PNG was only ever intended to be a format to store image data, not animation data. The use of GIF animations wasn't very widespread when the GIF LZW patent crisis prompted a group of developers to work on the PNG specification. MNG is the sister format, is specifically intended to cover animation applications, and builds upon the PNG specification. (Without glancing at the specs, I recall that a PNG is more-or-less a valid MNG file, but not the other way around -- MNG is therefore a superset of PNG. Although I worked on the PNG spec, I have no real connection to the MNG folks.)
APNG was an effort that originated outside the PNG/MNG group, and it failed to be ratified as an extension to PNG -- mainly because it goes contrary to the mission of PNG, which is to be a standard for storing single images. The rejection of the APNG proposal happened earlier this year, according to the Wikipedia article. Apparently undaunted, the Mozilla folks stuck APNG support into Firefox, but who knows if it'll stay there. The format extensions for APNG are officially unsupported and non-standard, making Firefox the lone holdout on this. Why they couldn't just support MNG is anyone's guess.
Basically, by the time animated GIF became a serious issue, the PNG spec was very close to frozen, and the core spec authors and library developers successfully argued that PNG should be kept solely for image storage. (During PNG development, a THMB chunk was proposed to store a thumbnail version of the full image. This was killed for similar reasons to the APNG extensions.) I tend to agree that stuffing animation features into a file format intended for still images makes the decoder more complicated, and doesn't offer a very optimal solution for animation. The whole notion of animated GIFs never sat well with me either, even though they proved to be popular with HTML jockeys.
Further reading seems to indicate that Mozilla's developers had MNG support, but yanked it in favor of APNG support. I can only guess the motivations, but sounds to me as though they wanted to blaze their own path for political/personal reasons, not necessarily sound technical reasons.