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?"

Comments

can this be the only solution?

[yagu]

I can't for my life figure out how Microsoft or why Microsoft introduces evil into this format and standard, other than Microsoft's track record. Unfortunately, that is sufficient... I'd vote no on any of their proposals.

The future and potential for photography is huge. There are:

• all the new buyers in the pipeline and hence,
• all the vendors of digital format pictures
• conversion to some archival and historical preserve all existing paper documents
• mapping and navigation software (e.g., Windows Live Earth).
• web graphics in ever higher definition

Microsoft makes their promise to make this free. Somehow, that just rings a tad hollow. Must we continue to be the Charlie Brown to Microsoft's Lucy?

Re:can this be the only solution?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Microsoft makes their promise to make this free. The exact wording from the article is, "offer a royalty-free grant for its patents that are required to implement" --I'm sure there are more details to the offer, but just because it is royalty-free doesn't necessarily mean that there won't be other terms that are deal breakers.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[LionKimbro]

Well, here's a thought --

They say, "One important aspect regarding the standardization of HD Photo is Microsoft's commitment to make its patents that are required to implement the specification available without charge."

"Alright, fair enough," I think, but then I wonder: "So, what's the application process like, and what are the licensing requirements?"

Might they say something like, "Oh, it's available free of charge, but you can't use it in an OpenSource / FreeSoftware project, because that's uncontrolled, there's no telling what liabilities we'll be exposed to, for letting you implement this, ... (etc etc etc, filler nonsense here.)" ..?

Maybe that's "the trick" here?

Re:can this be the only solution?

[St. Arbirix]

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.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[morgan_greywolf]

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.

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/analy zing_the_m.html for example.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[Daniel Phillips]

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.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[RegularFry]

They pulled back from a previous licence they were going to release it under, which would have specifically prohibited, for example, a Gimp interface. You can see the old licence details here: http://blogs.msdn.com/billcrow/archive/2006/06/30/ 651898.aspx

The current licence is *much* more liberal, and I think Microsoft deserve credit for the move. I still don't trust them, but they did make a move in the right direction in this case.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[LionKimbro]

You sound like you know what you're talking about;

I wish I could mod you up.

nntr

Re:can this be the only solution?

[DogDude]

Unless you can point to a MS standard that MS said that it would be free to implement and then charged for it, then you're just spreading FUD.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[RegularFry]

I did some early work with it when it was still Windows Media Photo. It's genuinely a good format. I just hope it doesn't get bogged down in politics and legal wrangling.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[crazzeto]

Which is why it's a good thing you're not on the panel... Seriously, you have to examine the offer in its entirety along with the technical details of the specification. It could be that the MS "standard" is the best thing out there, if this is the case, assuming there isn't a horrible amount of red tape why not go with HD-Photo?

Re:can this be the only solution?

[heinousjay]

The world isn't really suffering. A small percentage of the world grates against it, but it seems to me to be personal.

Of course, I'm not an idealist, so I know not what crazy cravings lurk within your heart.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[I'm Don Giovanni]

I did some early work with it when it was still Windows Media Photo. It's genuinely a good format. I just hope it doesn't get bogged down in politics and legal wrangling.

I won't speak to the potential for "legal wrangling", but regarding "politics", if this does get bogged down in politics then you can bet that it'll be the anything-but-Microsoft folks that are to blame. Hell, this very subthread starts with a post saying that this format should be rejected just because it comes from Microsoft, regardless of the merits and regardless of how liberal the license is. In other words, the format should be rejected on the basis of politics. The same BS that goes on in the ODF vs OOXML debates (the reality is that 90% of that debate is politics BS, not technical merits).

Re:can this be the only solution?

[Twanfox]

I would imagine much of this distrust stems from Microsoft's tendency to stifle competition and get away with it. That is not to say that this move of theirs isn't appropriate, genuine, or truly innovative. Once you've been bitten once (or several times), you tend to look at the person biting you with a more cautious eye and wonder if/how/when they're going to bite you again.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[pionzypher]

Indeed. The HD Photo Device Porting Kit SDK for this has licensing terms which prohibit its use in a copyleft manner.

2. c. Distribution Restrictions. You may not ... modify or distribute the source code of any Distributable Code so that any part of it becomes subject to an Excluded License. An Excluded License is one that requires, as a condition of use, modification or distribution, that the code be disclosed or distributed in source code form; or others have the right to modify it.



So for an open source solution, it would have to be written from the HD Photo Bitstream Specification (also assuming Microsoft does cover HD Photo under the Open Specification Promise)

BSD type licenses may also be compatible.

Most of this info was taken from wikipedia.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[node 3]

The same BS that goes on in the ODF vs OOXML debates (the reality is that 90% of that debate is politics BS, not technical merits). Not being able to implement a document format in an Open Source project *is* a technical merit.

It's Microsoft who's to blame for pushing politics into technical merits. How dare you blame the victim.

I prefer my standards, interfaces and formats open and freely implementable. MS prefers to own them fully. Everyone who *isn't* MS would do best to join us in the "free and open" camp, and until MS themselves join us, they *fully* deserve to be criticized, and their proposals rejected out of hand.

MS has been making overtures of compromise, which deserve some credit, but can never be enough on this topic. In the context of standards, open and free are binary, there's no half-way, because all it takes is *one* legal restriction to prevent open source implementations.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[jez9999]

They've made what appears to be a legally binding promise they aren't going to dick people over this one

Legally binding? Bear in mind that MS openly flaunted antitrust law in several continents, and pretty much got away with it.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[aliquis]

"Hey I wrote a program which doesn't accept patented features and now I can't use them!! boho!"

Straight on target there Sir.

Solution: Release your application which needs support for it under another license.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[StikyPad]

The first hit is always royalty free.

Well, except at Her Majesty's afterparties, but you get the point.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[Vexorian]

patents=retarded.

"Hey I thought that just not using the GPL would save me!! boho!"

Yeah right, keep dreaming

Re:can this be the only solution?

[Jerry]

Which is why it's a good thing you're not on the panel... Seriously, you have to examine the offer in its entirety along with the technical details of the specification. It could be that the MS "standard" is the best thing out there, if this is the case, assuming there isn't a horrible amount of red tape why not go with HD-Photo?

He probably couldn't get on the panel after Microsoft finishes stuffing it with MS Sycophants that will vote FOR the MS "standard".

It is also obvious that you haven't been following Microsoft's tactics over the years. My favorite is an MS started and funded 5013c org, headed by James Pendergast, that claimed to be "grass roots". It wrote letters to congressmen and the public asking them to force the DOJ to stop "persecuting" Microsoft. The scam blew up in their face when it was discovered that the names on many of the letters were residents of their local cemeteries. Thus arose the term "Astroturfing", meaning fake "grass roots".

Why not go with HD-Photo? Because past history has taught us that Microsoft strives for only one thing: customers LOCKED INTO their proprietary formats. Just check out Massachusetts's document standards fiasco to see what that would mean for citizens of that state.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[Citizen of Earth]

It's a trap!

Re:can this be the only solution?

[Hucko]

Yes, once there was a small percentage of the world against s/slavery/absolute monarchy/smoking/etc too... In some circumstances, people could argue they were wrong and oblivious to how the world works. Many people did.

Fortunately, most of the world came to their senses. Thank you Small Percentage!

Re:can this be the only solution?

[Kalriath]

It's Microsoft who's to blame for pushing politics into technical merits. How dare you blame the victim. Ironically, that RIGHT THERE is exactly the sort of thing the GP was talking about. Noone's the victim in these matters, but everyone's an aggressor. Get it right.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[Kalriath]

You mean like MP3 Pro? Funnily enough Microsoft has never done the crap you claim. But someone else sure has.

FUD. I vote "depends".

Re:can this be the only solution?

[The_Wilschon]

As I understand it, the reason for the politics in ODF/OOXML is that technical factors bring in politics. OOXML allows documents to contain chunks that look like mumble, where mumble is a binary dump of a Word 97 document. This is, of course, a technical matter, a detail of the specification. However, since Word 97 format is not itself open in the slightest (a political matter, openness), this particular technical matter drags in politics in a big way.

OTOH, this political matter, lack of openness, drags in technical problems as well. A spec which is not open must be reverse engineered (and even then there is dubious legality), so only those who have access to the closed spec will necessarily be able to implement it correctly. This tilts the playing field for the software market heavily in favor of those with access to the closed spec. Any competitors will find that either their software fails to function correctly, or they have to do a lot more work to get correctly functioning software. The result: either a monoculture/monopoly in software using this spec, or a variety of incompatible attempts at implementing the spec, resulting in inability to carry files from one computer to another and expect them to still work.

So, a technical matter in the OOXML spec results in political wrangling, which wrangling is motivated by technical reasons anyways. Dig a little bit deeper than most people are willing to, and you find that it really isn't a matter (for most people) of Anything-But-Microsoft. It may look that way, because MS offerings are so consistently rejected, but nearly always, it is actually for technical reasons (perhaps technical by way of political in the middle, but technical at both ends (motivation for objection, and object of objection)).

Now, the OP who said "we should reject this just because it is from MS" might be a true Anything-But-Microsoft person. That would certainly explain the remark. OTOH, caution, a look at history, and an understanding of the technical matters involved in said history would also explain the remark quite easily. The reference to MS' "track record" suggests to me that perhaps the latter explanation is the right one. But then again, I'm an eternal optimist, always seeking to think the best of people until I actually have a real reason to think otherwise.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[mrchaotica]

Hell, this very subthread starts with a post saying that this format should be rejected just because it comes from Microsoft, regardless of the merits and regardless of how liberal the license is.

No, it says it should be rejected because the fact that it's from Microsoft makes us suspicious that the license is actually much less liberal than the article implies.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[mrchaotica]

How the fuck does expecting to actually be able to use the standard in Free Software make us an aggressor?!

Re:can this be the only solution?

[Kalriath]

And how the fuck does writing a new version of a license specifically to get Microsoft not make you an aggressor?!

Re:can this be the only solution?

[mrchaotica]

Beats me, but that's irrelevant because nobody ever did so.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[swillden]

And how the fuck does writing a new version of a license specifically to get Microsoft not make you an aggressor?!

Who wrote a license specifically to get Microsoft? Note that if you're talking about GPLv3 and the Novell/Microsoft deal, you need to note the following text in the final version of the license: "unless you entered into that arrangement, or that patent license was granted, prior to 28 March 2007."

The FSF added that specifically to avoid being an "aggressor".

If you're talking about some other license written specifically "to get Microsoft", please elaborate.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[kripkenstein]

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

Regarding code implementing the standard, you are indeed passing on any patent license that you have (a totally worthless one, if it even counts as one). The license (again, for whatever it is worth) is universal and nondiscriminatory. So no GPL problem there.

Regarding code implementing functionality not in the standard but sort of implied by it ("SpacingLikeWord97", etc.), this may indeed be a problem - you might be sued. But you can still write GPL code to implement it, there is no problem with the GPL's patent clause - the problem is with (possible) Microsoft patents. In fact, such code would be just as 'dangeous' as running Linux, given Microsoft's recent statements (or, to be more precise, just as dangerous as running Mono).

Re:can this be the only solution?

[node 3]

Ironically, that RIGHT THERE is exactly the sort of thing the GP was talking about. Noone's the victim in these matters, but everyone's an aggressor. Get it right. That doesn't even make any sense. MS is the one on the offensive--trying to pass a standard. The question is whether that standard is poisoned (which is a highly pertinent question, given Microsoft's history with such things). The rest of us are just reacting--specifically trying to make sure this doesn't become just another in a long list of detrimental standards from Redmond.

Those of us who react negatively to MS are not the initiators, we are not looking to pick a fight. We are just defending freedom, openness and interoperability. If MS starts acting responsibly, like IBM or Apple do, you'll find anti-MS sentiment evaporating, just like anti-IBM and anti-Apple sentiment has.

It takes a very special type of relativism to call *us* the aggressors, if that's really what you think to call us.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[WinchesterPC.Com]

Microsoft is still not sure what Open Source really is. Lately, I get the feeling that they really are trying to figure it out. It goes so much against their way of doing things that they're having real trouble with it. It's like when someone is trying to figure out the plan of salvation and just doesn't quite get it, no matter how much people try to explain it. I think they will either get it or get frustrated and give up.

...those sentences don't all end in a preposition, do they? that's something we don't put up with....err, something up with which we do not put.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[Divebus]

Microsoft has never done the crap you claim.

Holy Cow. We just lived through a decade of that kind of behavior and you didn't notice? mp3Pro (so what) is licensable just like MP3, JPEG and everything else. Thomson never offered MP3 encoders up for free then suddenly demand royalties once MP3 got traction. Thomson always required a license. They did, however, suddenly demand a license for MP3 decoders. They're all greedy bastards. Submarine ransom demands are a great side business for Microsoft as well and everything they release is another opportunity to collect undue cash:

• Microsoft encouraged the proliferation of FAT32 and one day started demanding massive royalties from all the Flash manufacturers they suckered in. Too bad they missed out on the floppy disk makers.
• Terminal Services which was FREE on their servers until they encouraged enough people to use it (think Citrix) and one day they demanded all end users pay $60 per year per CAL with 3 months to comply. That made running Citrix real expensive.
• Microsoft suddenly demanded royalties for hardware you connect to Xbox (steering wheels, controllers etc). Let the peripheral market develop then say "wanna stay in business? Pay up suckers".
• How about the royalty threats against Samba, OSS (Linux), Mono - some of it they stole fair and square themselves from somewhere else - but are trying to figure out how to claim it or control it anyway?
• They've patented their new Word file format, which is claimed to be XML but is really a compendium of proprietary digital glop. Wait until they start suing for reading a Word document without a royalty (bye-bye OpenOffice and other competitors). They're tolerating it for now but let it approach critical mass and they'll cut that Golden Goose open too.
• What do you suppose is up with everything Microsoft is patenting? Bloody obvious stuff with prior art is getting patented. Are they in a contest of who can bamboozle the Patent Office the most? Nope. It's just business and they're using those patents to chase competitors who can't afford to defend themselves against suits or royalty demands.

I'm no expert on their activities but this is a common historical pattern that nearly anyone can see (do you read Slashdot by any chance?). I've even been stung directly by their behavior and have seen the difference between profiting from your effort and profiteering off your victims. For the last decade, Microsoft has held back real progress by co-opting rising technologies, modifying them a little to make sure their competitors fail, and re-releasing a crudely inferior shadow of the original. The original technology is now overwhelmed and eliminated by their own version. Interoperability was never in Microsoft's interest. That's how a lot of dreams ended. Developers and users were simply upgrading their handcuffs with each new release of Microsoft "technology". Now, Microsoft is being dragged backwards through their own stew. The last resort is trying to control competition through patent infringement threats and forging deals with unlikely allies in order to threaten the rest of their competitors who didn't sign a pact with them. There's no innovation going on there. They're even trying to capture some of the OpenSource halo by calling proprietary technologies "Open" in an attempt to tie the word to Microsoft in the eyes of people who don't know any better.

Ach. Look at the time...

Re:can this be the only solution?

[Cyclops]

If it isn't a patent grant, it is incompatible with the GNU GPL.

Microsoft's promise not to sue is ... incredible.

We'll allow you to commit infringement.

In Europe, Directive 2004/48/EC makes it a public crime, so Microsoft doesn't even have to act, the District Attorneys are mandated to act on public crimes, specially if denounced by someone.. who doesn't have to be Microsoft.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[crazzeto]

So even if HD-Photo is the clearly superior technology (I don't know that it is, but let's assume for a second it is) we should ignore it and go with something else that isn't Microsoft on general principal? Does that about sum up your position?

Re:can this be the only solution?

[caldodge]

> Bear in mind that MS openly flaunted antitrust law

s/flaunted/flouted/

Re:can this be the only solution?

[Bert64]

Aside from that, no "standard" should be developed and pushed by only one company...
Any proposal to create a standard should be formed by a committee, to which relevant parties are explicitely invited (adobe, camera makers etc) but from which noone is excluded.

Re:can this be the only solution?

[RAMMS EIN]

``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''

Isn't that exactly what they do with .NET?

Grammar nazis

[doombringerltx]

Before a ton of posts show up bitching the last sentence, you should ask yourself is grammar a big of an issue as you think?

Re:Grammar nazis

[msuarezalvarez]

as opposed to having his IQ correctly underestimated?

Re:Grammar nazis

[Valdrax]

Before a ton of posts show up bitching about the last sentence, you should ask yourself, "Is grammar as big of an issue as you think?"

Fixed.

Re:Grammar nazis

[Remusti]

Before a ton of posts show up bitching about the last sentence, you should ask yourself, "Is grammar as much of an issue as you think?"

Fixed.

Re:Grammar nazis

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

Before a ton of posts show up bitching the last sentence, you should ask yourself is grammar a big of an issue as you think?

Yes, it is. See this example of how costly sloppy grammar and punctuation can be.

Re:Grammar nazis

[Valdrax]

Technically, that's a style and not a grammar issue, but...
I'll still concede to having been bested.

Re:Grammar nazis

[Divebus]

Who let the English professor on Slashdot?

</humor>

Re:Grammar nazis

[SteveFoerster]

Before a ton of posts show up bitching about the last sentence, you should ask yourself, "Is grammar as much of an issue as I think?"

Fixed.

Re:Grammar nazis

[noSignal]

Fixed.
Fragment (consider revising)

Re:Grammar nazis

[Remusti]

You're probably correct. Technically correct, which is the best kind of correct. For some reason the phrase "as big of" has always grated with me.

Re:Grammar nazis

[Bonobo_Unknown]

Before a ton of posts show up bitching about the last sentence, you should ask yourself, "Is I as much grammar of think an issue as ?"

Fucked.

Re:Grammar nazis

[Godwin O'Hitler]

"For some reason the phrase "as big of" has always grated with me."

Don't sound apologetic; it should grate. The "of" is noise. "As big an issue" is the correct construction.

I find it funny that the final sentence was so bad that even a grammar nazi hater was shocked by it, and yet said person still springs to its defence.

As long as anyone can implement it ...

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

The key issue is not whether it is coming from MSFT or if it gives MSFT any leg up. They key issue, can anyone implement the standard directly without payments, without agreements without any restrictions? MSFT can very well say, there is no payment but all implementors should sign some agreement with us. Then there could be a clause that could revoke the agreement. Thus if any competitor gets too big MSFT can pull the rug from under them.

If the specification is as free as ASCII, to use one example, then there is nothing wrong in adopting that as a standard.

Re:As long as anyone can implement it ...

[ajs]

They key issue, can anyone implement the standard directly without payments, without agreements without any restrictions? MSFT can very well say, there is no payment but all implementors should sign some agreement with us. Then there could be a clause that could revoke the agreement. You're not thinking deviously enough. What they REALLY want to do is have all of the most popular Web data formats require the use of their patents, and then issue a blanked right to use those patents for free to anyone... but in a way that's not GPLv3 compatible.

This is Microsoft's dream because you can't contest it in court. The agreement you're violating if you mix this technology with GPLv3 code is NOT the agreement with Microsoft, but the GPLv3! You would have to sue the FSF in order to use Microsoft's image format in your GPLv3 code.

For all that I despise the tactic, I have to admit that it's a clever little hack.

Re:As long as anyone can implement it ...

[Chandon Seldon]

I'm not seeing how they would cleanly construct such an attack. The patent license restrictions in GPLv3 are very specific - I don't think that Microsoft can come up with a licensing setup that would run into trouble with the GPL and still be considered distributable by "Open Source" type vendors.

Even if they did come up with such a patent license, the vendors can simply ship libjpegxr as a platform library and still not have any trouble with the GPLv3.

Re:As long as anyone can implement it ...

[Archangel Michael]

So, what you are saying is that Microsoft is playing the same game as GPL3, except to their advantage, not FOSS or GPL3 or ......

Begun the license wars have.

Re:As long as anyone can implement it ...

[msuarezalvarez]

They're not the one trying to tie developers' hands.

I imagine you are implying by this that the GPL proponents are trying to tie developers' hands?

Re:As long as anyone can implement it ...

[ajs]

For all that I despise the tactic, I have to admit that it's a clever little hack. Yeesh, could you use "hack" more pretentiously? Pretentiously?

I mean the word in exactly the same way that I mean it when I say that the GPL is one of the cleverest hacks ever perpetrated on the copyright system. It uses the system itself as leverage to bypass the design goals of the system, which is not only smart, but hadn't been done in the 200 years of US copyright law that preceded it. c.f. the Jargon File's "The Meaning of 'Hack'":

Hacking might be characterized as 'an appropriate application of ingenuity'. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it.

Re:As long as anyone can implement it ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I asked if *you* could use it more pretentiously. It goes without saying that Eric Raymond can use it more pretentiously!

Re:As long as anyone can implement it ...

[ajs]

I asked if *you* could use it more pretentiously. It goes without saying that Eric Raymond can use it more pretentiously! Oh, you were trolling. I understand.

Re:As long as anyone can implement it ...

[lilomar]

GOTO: 20091703

Re:As long as anyone can implement it ...

[cyclop]

Ok, couldn't we just have a GPLv2 app doing that?

Re:As long as anyone can implement it ...

[Dog-Cow]

The purpose of the GPL, from inception to the present, has always been to tie the developer's hands in favor of freeing the receiver's. That the "receiver" of most GPL code is in turn a developer who uses the code with his own is *entirely* incidental to the purpose of the license.

Re:As long as anyone can implement it ...

[Macthorpe]

Isn't that exactly what the GPL is meant to do?

Re:As long as anyone can implement it ...

[msuarezalvarez]

You imagine I'm implying that? That was explicitly my point!

You should have your sarcasm detector checked: it seems not to be working.

The goal of the GPL started as simplicity, and over time it's been evolving into a scheme to trap developers, distributors and users of libraries. The great-grandparent's point illustrates it perfectly, even if he blames the wrong party.

There is no scheme to trap anyone: it is quite simple: if you do not want to accept the conditions I impose on my code, then write your own. If you are not willing to comply with my licence for my library, then do not use it. It is not that hard, really...

How on earth can that be construed as a scheme to trap anyone? And how is it different from anything else (apart from the fact that the GPL allow the party accepting it to do things that party would otherwise be not allowed to do)?

Re:As long as anyone can implement it ...

[msuarezalvarez]

The GPL does not trap anyone. Everyone that accepts the license accepts it; everyone that does not accept the license, well, carries on with his/her life. You cannot accidentally or unwillingly accept the license. Were you forcefully coerced to release code under the GPL, essentially any sane court would rule that the licensing would be invalid.

I honestly fail to see how one can describe the GPL as a trap of any kind.

Re:As long as anyone can implement it ...

[msuarezalvarez]

One can hardly describe as 'trapping' the fact that the GPL allows developers to do things that, with a more standard license, would not be allowed. No license grants all rights to the party accepting it.

Re:As long as anyone can implement it ...

[MrNaz]

There's a little more to it than that. The "if you don't like it, don't use it" argument is pretty silly, and if you're going to apply it, apply it everywhere: If you don't like Microsoft's behavior, don't use their software, and forgo the rights to whine about them.

Re:As long as anyone can implement it ...

[msuarezalvarez]

Huh?

I don't use MS's software. I do not whine about it. I don't like it, so I don't use it.

Anyways... Could you explain what relevance your comment has on this subdiscussion?

Re:As long as anyone can implement it ...

[JohnBailey]

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Microsoft were trying to stick a specific digit up at the Open source community, and Apple if they can get away with it. Obviously they are trying to pull a fast one. Microsoft always does. But I can see a hole in this strategy.

Provided the license for this format doesn't specify which OS it is allowed to be used with, it doesn't have to be incompatible with an OS using the GPL3 license. None of the GPL licenses exclude the use of non GPL code in a given OS any more than it makes everything it touches GPL3, they just enforce the right for GPL licensed code to remain GPL as the original author intended.

So a self contained converter could be made that would take the Microsoft file as an input and spit out a different uncompressed format with all the data intact. Ideal for a load/save plug-in for almost anything. Specific uses could be something like photo importers which could do the translation on the fly like they do now with RAW, graphics packages like Gimp, or specific one function programs that convert formats from closed to lossless open. And providing the specifications are published without the hook of having to be only used on a Microsoft OS, its not that big a deal. Even browsers should be able to decompress and convert the images on a web page on the fly, and not have to bother with reverse engineering the format. The plug-in isn't GPL3, but it doesn't have to be.

Samba(GPL3) works fine with the Linux kernel(GPL2) and Apache(non GPL as far as I remember) and Nvidia graphics card drivers(closed source binary). There may be some conditions that make it impossible to pack it as part of a distribution, but that's what third party repositories are for, and there is nothing stopping the author distributing the program themselves, thus not distributing a single line of GPL3 code, so not infringing on anybodies patents, licenses, or idealism.

How good this is for Microsoft as an attack on GPL, other than the FUD that already seems to be flying here, remains to be seen. Assuming that is, that it makes it as a major file format..

Re:As long as anyone can implement it ...

[MrNaz]

Wow... I replied to your post while thinking about another one. My neural lines got crossed. Don't worry I've taken my medication for the day now and apologize for replying to your post thinking I was replying to someone else's.

Wait for the...

[chriseyre2000]

Clause that means that GPL code cannot take advantage of the patent protection.

Re:"Nothing for you to see here; please move along

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

"Nothing for you to see here; please move along"

Wow! The image compression used by Microsoft's HD Photo format is so good that it can reduce any image down to 0 bits!

could someone enlighten me?

[Paktu]

Could someone enlighten me on this issue? I don't really understand the problems with the existing format...

From TFA:
"JPEG XR features include fixed or floating point high dynamic range, wide gamut image encoding, better compression compared to JPEG, lossless compression, the ability to store 16 or 32 bits of data per color, and support for CMYK, RGB, monochrome, and embedded ICC color profiles."

Is any of this going to matter to the vast majority of users? It's not like I care about compression when I'm dealing with 500kb image files.

Re:could someone enlighten me?

[everphilski]

Your digital camera puts out 500kb native resolution files?

Re:could someone enlighten me?

[19thNervousBreakdown]

It's not like I care about compression when I'm dealing with 500kb image files.

OK, how about a 1GB file? (8 megapixel * 32 bits/CYMK)
Or how about 5,000 500KB images?

Don't forget that most pictures taken with digital cameras these days are full of noise, and generally crap.

Re:could someone enlighten me?

[fbjon]

I'm thinking of cameras: JPEG is 24-bit, or 8-bit x 3 channels. Camera sensors can pick up more than that, however. Better compression also means better use of memory cards.

Most importantly, lossless compression might mean that you don't need to shoot in RAW all the time, and be at the camera manufacturer's mercy.

Re:could someone enlighten me?

[TheRaven64]

OK, how about a 1GB file? (8 megapixel * 32 bits/CYMK) I'm not sure how you work that out. 32-bits per channel, CMYK (i.e. 4 channels), gives 16 bytes per channel. For an 8 megapixel image, that's a 128MB image. I'm not sure what kind of camera generates a CMYK image, since CMYK is subtractive mixing, and cameras record light, so RGB seems more likely, giving only three channels. Most CCDs are at most 12 or 14bits. At 14 bits per channel, this only gives 42MB for an uncompressed 8 megapixel image. Raw formats often include two green values for each pixel (or a cyan one for some), to closer match human eyes, bringing us back to 4 channels, requiring 56MB. Even with a raw image, we are still a long way away from 1GB/image.

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.

Re:could someone enlighten me?

[Sciros]

If you're dealing with small images, sure. But, um... HD photos can be several megabytes in size each. Any hi-res graphic will be affected quite a bit by the quality of compression used to store it.

Yes, the "vast majority" of users won't be affected. They also shouldn't be reading up on this or posting in this thread. Indeed it doesn't concern them. But there's an important minority of users (photographers, artists, other designers) who actually care about image formats.

The same can be said for music, video, etc.

Re:could someone enlighten me?

[icegreentea]

maybe he's talking about images off a computer? like a 3d render, or an illustration of some sort which has to be rediculously big, detailed, printed, and compressed.

Re:could someone enlighten me?

[Dogtanian]

Your digital camera puts out 500kb native resolution files? Yeah, he does all his photography with one of these.

352 pixels x 288 pixels x 3 bytes/pixel = 304,128 bytes uncompressed!

Re:could someone enlighten me?

[dexotaku]

As someone who regularly works on images whose uncompressed size [at only 8-bit/channel RGB] is in excess of 150MB, I find the quest for a new standard pretty relevant. I also find that the suggestion that MS's "open licensing" won't allow for use in GPL'd software suggests that this format might already be dead on the water.

Re:could someone enlighten me?

[akreps]

Most importantly, lossless compression might mean that you don't need to shoot in RAW all the time, and be at the camera manufacturer's mercy. Actually, RAW has a number of advantages over simple lossless compression. My camera's RAW format stores the raw data that the sensor recorded (along with a slew of camera settings), which is more than a simple RGB value. After the photo has been taken, I can change the values that the sensor interpreted, which allows me much more freedom than only being able to adjust the color and/or brightness. For example, the RAW format gives me the ability to change a day scene to night and vice versa without blowing out the exposure.

What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[DamienMcKenna]

Honestly, what's wrong with JPEG2000? CPU power has come a long way since it was originally released, so why isn't it more standard?

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[ChronoReverse]

The kind of patent royalties that Microsoft is promising not to charge is the problem with JPEG2000

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[fbjon]

Cameras don't have infinite battery.

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[MightyMartian]

I think JPEGs would be a damn hard standard to overcome. They tried it with PNGs to overcome the GIF legal encumbrances, but just what percentage of images out there in the wild are PNGs?

Quite frankly, I think JPEGs as they stand are too far along now for something that, with modern CPU power, offers an almost imperceptible advantage, to get any traction. Ten years ago, when computers and the Internet were slower, they might have had a chance, but now, no way.

There are too many real things to hate and fear Microsoft over. This appears to me to be a nonstarter, sort of like MSN has turned out to be for web searching.

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[cmowire]

The problems largely boil down to:

1. JPEG2000 is covered by patents that haven't been properly licensed
2. JPEG2000 has very little software support, wheras good old JPEG will work eveyrwhere. Which helps your average user who doesn't want to need an image editor.
3. The digital camera market has standardized to RAW for cases where JPEG isn't good enough. Neither the existing JPEG2000 nor HD Photo are designed to store un-demosaiced data from the sensor. This allows a RAW converter to offer smarter noise reduction and sharpening modes... and it's not trivial enough of an operation that any arbitrary JPEG2000-ish tool should be forced to implement properly.
4. People don't quite realized the level of screwed we are with respect to TIFF, so it still seems "good enough" for most folks.
5. Adobe, who has the photo-editing market by the balls, would rather have you stuck with their proprietary formats as much as possible.

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[Gobbin]

but just what percentage of images out there in the wild are PNGs? More and more now that IE 7 renders PNG transparencies without workarounds. The barrier to PNG adaptation was IE 6, not JPEG.

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[Trillan]

Wasn't there a $25,000 USD fee associated with getting full access to the standard a few years ago?

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[cmowire]

Heh heh, yah.

Standardized like Microsoft has standardized on monopolistic practices. :D

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[evilviper]

They tried it with PNGs to overcome the GIF legal encumbrances, but just what percentage of images out there in the wild are PNGs?

PNG has been pretty successful, and getting moreso all the time.

The problem, as I see it, is that they didn't include (simple) animation capabilities in the standard from the start. So while PNG is fairly popular, GIF still has to be used for animated images of any kind.

IMHO, SVG suffers the same problem. It's touted as being an alternative to flash, but it has no audio capabilities (to go along with it's animation capabilities).

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[ceoyoyo]

Because nobody really cares. For web pages an 8-bit JPEG is pretty hard to beat. There's no point in more than 8-bit and the little bit of extra quality you'd get from JPEG2000 OR HD Photo isn't worth the trouble. For everything else there are better formats. The only thing JPEG is really missing is transparency.

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[an.echte.trilingue]

Well, there are not many PNGs in the wild because IE6 does not support its alpha channel. Thus, there is no real reason to switch to PNG (although having a full color palette is nice by itself), especially concidering the hoops you have to jump through to get the file sizes down to the same size as a .gif (you need to use tools outside of GIMP/Photoshop such as optipng and pngnq). Web designers (I am, unfortunately, one of them) know how easy it would be to make slick looking websites using images with alpha channel (just having aliased edges for your logos is a huge advantage), but we don't use it because around 60% of our users can't render them properly. IE7 does support the alpha channel (finally) and all the other major browsers have supported it for years. As soon as IE6 falls below 5% market share (or so), people like me will start using PNGs very frequently.

They will replace .gifs, I promise you that, unless something better comes along between now and the time it takes for IE6 to die.

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[A Friendly Troll]

Quite frankly, I think JPEGs as they stand are too far along now for something that, with modern CPU power, offers an almost imperceptible advantage, to get any traction. Ten years ago, when computers and the Internet were slower, they might have had a chance, but now, no way. FTFA:

Microsoft has sunk a great deal of work into HD Photo/JPEG XR and is aiming it specifically towards digital photography and other image capturing devices.

I'm not an expert when it comes to cameras, but the way I understand it, any camera can store JPEG files on its memory cards, and some offer a way to store device-specific RAW. Some even allow you to store the same picture in both formats at the same time, in case you aren't satisfied with the JPEG version and want to process the RAW data.

Now, the problem with RAW - again, I stress that I'm far from being an expert - seems to be that each manufacturer has their own format, which also changes in different camera models. There are many different RAW-editing programs, which feature support for a subset of different cameras. It's common to have, say, five programs that support your particular camera, and each of them will load and display the picture *differently* for some reason - either because of incomplete support, or because of bad (reverse-engineered?) specs, or the phase of the moon.

What HD Photo seems to be aiming at is unification of digital camera storage formats, not to be a generic JPEG replacement - it's silly to even think about that. The HD Photo taken on your Canon should thus be compatible with Fuji's own "RAW" image editing program, for example, and there would be no need to have a trillion camera drivers/plugins/whatever just to support the trillion cameras' native storage format.

There are also some other things that I think HD Photo does. For example, some cameras allow you to take the same picture with different exposure settings (usually three), so you could do some HDR stuff with that. Instead of getting three files, you could have it all in just one. Also, when zooming in a section of a photo on your camera, you wouldn't need to decode the entire (JPEG) file into the camera's internal memory, because HD Photo seems to allow fast decoding of a particular area instead of the whole thing.

That's at least how I understood it. I definitely like the idea, but they need to open it up and get rid of the patents.

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[ceoyoyo]

RE being screwed by TIFF: poppycock.

The major RAW formats are freely documented and readable by open source software. Yes, the manufacturers aren't particularly helpful, but they're (mostly) not being active hinderances either.

A RAW "image" isn't really an image. Only after conversion is it really an image. Like a negative and a print, both the RAW and the converted image are valuable, and both should probably be kept. If you're talking about art though, it's the TIFF, not the RAW.

TIFF files aren't that delicate. The whole point of the TIFF format is that the metadata is human readable in most cases and well documented in the exceptional cases. Non-standard tags are not essential to recovering the image. It's easy to write a TIFF reader. Some applications don't have particularly good TIFF readers or writers but even so the image is recoverable.

You complain about losing information in non-standard tags. Sure, it's a possibility, but it's been mitigated as much as possible by specifying that those tags are supposed to be human readable whenever possible. The alternative is to have a restrictive specification that mandates each and every allowable piece of metadata... which means that information in those non-standard tags would never be recorded at all. That's NOT a better solution.

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[jez9999]

The only thing JPEG is really missing is transparency.

And animation. And lossless images.

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[Mattsson]

They tried it with PNGs to overcome the GIF legal encumbrances, but just what percentage of images out there in the wild are PNGs? One of the biggest problems PNG had to overcome was the "Chicken/Egg" situation regarding Microsoft, most particularly Internet Explorer.
A gif replacement that has defective or even no support at all in the worlds most used browser-software and that you can not open in the worlds most used OS? Not going to see much use, is it?
PNG was, until recently, the format of choice in the communities that didn't care much for IE-compatibility, and that isn't a very big crowd even when counting people running web-servers mostly aimed at the Linux- or Unix-communities.

In order for a file-format to have a quick success, Microsoft must use it as a standard format and have complete support for it.
They only fully support heavily entrenched formats that they can not ignore and they only use their own formats as defaults.

Why must MS support it for success? Simple. Most people use MS software. Only MS software. Most people do not know how to use a non-default file-format, nor do they care what format they use as long as their mobile-phone, "mp3-player", digital-camera, etc, support it.
Compare the amount of media-capable devices that can play .ogg with the ones that can play .wma.
If MS had things their way, Mediaplayer wouldn't even play mp3-files. Since it's such a widespread format, they have to support it, even if they'd never even dream fever-nightmares about using it as a default format and much less use ogg.

If the current JPEG was replaced with a format that had complete support in every updated MS software or device and was the standard format in all MS software and that the MS PR-division started putting pressure onto every other hardware/software-company to support, it might not be long until JPEG has been replaced.
Say, 4-6 years from introduction?
A year or two for it to become optional in cameras, another year or two for it to become default, another 2-3 years for the old equipment to become obsolete and replaced.
In the area of worldwide default industry standards, I'd say that's a quick shift.

But sometimes the average Joe and the world industry will surprise you and do something extraordinary like not going for the easy road of doing what MS tells them to. =) (Nope, I've never been told that I'm a cynic.)
Let's hope this is one of those times.

sort of like MSN has turned out to be for web searching. And yet one see people using it as their default home-page everywhere.
What bothers me most about almost everything MS does on the internet is all the damn advertising.
One would think that a corporation like Microsoft could afford to offer at least a few online-services/applications without having so much advertising that it looks like a Taiwanese porn-site.

That was a long rant. I'll be silent now.
*silence*

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[jZnat]

but just what percentage of images out there in the wild are PNGs? Shitloads. Try the search with jpg and you get a bit more results (about 50% more) and gif (far less results; about 20% as many as png).

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[ceoyoyo]

We have other formats for animation. Personally I REALLY like having animation in another file format -- makes it easier to block. Maybe that's one of the reasons for JPEG's success -- it DOESN'T have animation.

You don't want lossless for the web.

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[xigxag]

Adobe, who has the photo-editing market by the balls, would rather have you stuck with their proprietary formats as much as possible.

It seems to me this is the bottom line. Microsoft are desperate to prevent Adobe (or Apple, Google, Sony, or any other company) from ever owning a fully vertical solution in any area of computing. A Microsoft-free shop is their worst fear because of the possibility the independence could spread like a cancer and put an end to their Windows/MS Office gravy train. So they're willing to do anything to slow down the Adobe juggernaut, even giving away specs for free. In Vegas terms, they're comping the development community to keep them playing at Microsoft's tables.

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[grahamd0]

I use PNGs quite frequently. I'd them for all my images if it weren't for the fact that JPEG is quite simply a better format for almost any time you don't need robust alpha-channel support.

The marginally reduced quality is more than made up for in greatly reduced file size.

There are perfectly functional methods for implementing PNG alpha channel support in IE6.

It's a shame that we have to use them, but they're there, and with IE's support for conditional comments, they don't hurt real browsers at all.

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[photomonkey]

"digital camera market has standardized to RAW for cases where JPEG isn't good enough"

.

Um. No. Working with RAW files is still a mondo pain in the ass, and no two pieces of software, be they Photoshop or manufacturer hand-outs handle them the same way.

As a person who works as a professional photographer, I can tell you that for ANY printing or publishing, there is one or maybe two options. 1)TIFF 2)JPG.

I fail to see the benefit of Adobe's DNG files, and I only use PSDs when I must save layers for one reason or another.

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[jez9999]

You don't want lossless for the web.

What are you smoking? Most sites now, with rich colours all over the place, would be screwed with lossless compression and look like shit.

Maybe you mean you don't mind a 256-colour palette (GIF). Well you can live with it, but it aint great. I try to use PNG everywhere I go.

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[an.echte.trilingue]

PNGs are a replacement for .gif, not JPG. They are used for different things.

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[ceoyoyo]

Let's have an example. I'm a photographer and I don't think I've ever come across anybody's photography site that didn't use JPEG, and wouldn't WANT to use lossless because it would take way too long to download. A high quality JPEG doesn't usually show any noticeable artifacts.

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[cmowire]

How is human readable going to help a piece of software?

It is currently impossible to reliably be able to read an arbitrary TIFF/JPEG image that contains various MakerNote and other undocumented flags, modify it slightly, and then be able to spit it out as a new file that preserves the various pieces of metadata. You'll likely corrupt any MakerNote fields your software doesn't understand.

So, really, the problem with the spec is that it doesn't at least require the metainformation to be understood in order to parse it properly...

I mean, read the exiv2 docs or dive into the TIFF specs if you don't believe me.

Only ensuring that the image is recoverable is pretty lame. The metainformation is just as important for archivists down the road.

Also, TIFF doesn't do files bigger than 2gb, Unicode, and other things.

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[jez9999]

You didn't say photography on photography sites. You said THE WEB.

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[cmowire]

Most of the pro photographers I know do editing between when the file leaves the camera and when the file is sent out to press/print. And they tend to take advantage of the RAW-friendly features to reduce noise, control sharpening precisely, adjust white balance, adjust contrast, etc. in ways that a JPEG or TIFF or JPEG2000 file wouldn't enable nearly as well.

I wouldn't necessarily say that it was an optimal sort of thing. The RAW file situation is a nasty ugly mess. But it works better than if cameras took JPEG2000 or TIFF files in many ways.

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[ceoyoyo]

Human readable is critically important if the format is going to be future proof. That makes figuring out how to read it a hundred years from now MUCH easier. Or, as you point out, with non-standard tags. If you want the information in them you just have to read them yourself. If the information is not human readable you can sometimes still figure out what it is, but it's much harder.

The TIFF specification says that you're supposed to ignore any tags you don't understand, and you're SUPPOSED to leave them in the file if you resave it. There are bad TIFF readers and writers, just like there are bad web browsers.

So with a properly written TIFF reader you get the image and any metadata it understands. Metadata it doesn't understand is ignored. Again, the alternative is to have a standard set of metadata tags and ONLY those tags that can be used. But then you end up changing your format completely every time something new comes out. A good example is EXIF -- TIFF was specified long before there were digital cameras and we needed any of the information contained in any EXIF tag. but when digital cameras came out we wanted all this extra information. TIFF handled it no problem... yet you can still read one of today's TIFF files with the TIFF reader I wrote circa 1994.

As for bigger images, unicode, whatever, TIFF is a container format, so all that needs to be done to support whatever you want is to update the spec with new image types. Most manufacturer's RAW files are actually TIFF files that use unofficial image formats to hold the raw data.

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[ceoyoyo]

Perhaps I wasn't specific enough originally. I was talking about pictures - images with some sort of recognizable content. Not little style elements like rounded corners. For those you really want a good vector format. The raster formats people use today are a bandaid that should NOT be fixed by introducing yet another raster format, lossless or otherwise. Particularly not a heavy duty format like JPEG2000. For now, PNG does the job just fine. I used photography sites as an example because they have the most pictures. News sites also use jpeg for pictures. So do personal sites. So do corporate sites, sites that sell things and sites for organizations. I can't really think of what else comprises THE WEB, but I suspect they use jpeg for their pictures too. Unless they're irritating advertising sites, in which case they probably use GIF or flash, both of which are pretty common to block.

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[cmowire]

No, the *right* way to do things is to have the format at least able to describe the size of each chunk of data and be self-contained. That way, you could copy any unknown information blocks to a new saved file without breaking anything.

This kinda works, in that you at least know the size of the chunks that you do not understand. However, right now, unknown chunks can be destroyed because too many of them encode offsets based on the beginning of the file, not the beginning of the chunk. You are pretty much guaranteed that if your program does not understand the individual MakerNote format that a file uses, it will be corrupted if you re-arrange the file.... and Canon and Nikon have taken to removing information from the publicly viewable EXIF information and moving it to the MakerNote. Really stupidly important stuff, too, like what ISO the camera was set to.

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[ceoyoyo]

As I said, a bad implementation of any file format isn't going to work well. That is not the spec's fault.

From a TIFF FAQ:

That's it, that's all there is to the highest level TIFF structure. Except for one more thing: the TIFF specification explicitly forbids tag data to include any offsets into the file or into any other TIFF data block, except for the documented special cases (TileOffsets, StripOffsets,...). This enables total relocatability of all structures and data blocks. That is a major corner stone of the format. It means it is actually easy to, e.g. unlink an IFD or concatenate multiple single-page TIFF to a single multi-page TIFF, or vice versa. If any tag's data could contain offsets pointing anywhere in the file, then software doing this or otherwise relocating data blocks should be aware of the exact nature of every tag's data in order to find all data blocks, and know what pointers ought to be changed. That is unfeasible, on the one hand, due to the number of defined tags and, on the other hand, it inhibits extendability and private tags.

Instead, the specification says that all tag data needs to be 'self-contained', and that only a selected few special tags are allowed to point to other locations in the file. Thus, all blocks become freely relocatable, can be read and written out in any order, and any software can quite simply joggle around all this TIFF data, with only inbuilt knowledge of these highest level structures, and of the selected few special tags.

Re:What's wrong with JPEG2000?

[Bert64]

I would imagine that digital cameras use custom chips designed for the task, rather than general purpose processors...
I imagine a chip designed specifically for JPEG2000 compression would use far less power than a general purpose CPU for the same task.

Re:FP

[cyclop]

What are the actual specs? Are they already out?

If yes, let's have a look. If not, we can just brace and wait; discussing would be meaningless (oh wait, this is /. !!)

Public Domain

[daeg]

If they are truly interested in making the patents "available", they would simply surrender the patents into the public domain. Since they have not done this, assume they will not always make the patents "available" to everyone or will have special cases where it is not available (for example, to extend the specification, or to set up a company that certifies HD Photo implementations, or "no government use without paying us", etc).

Re:Public Domain

[LionMage]

You can't make a patent "public domain," but you can dedicate a patent, which effectively means that anyone can use the patent without paying licensing fees. It also guarantees that nobody else can (legally) claim a patent covering the same invention.

Standard IANAL disclaimer applies.

Open Formats People!!!!

[xgr3gx]

Come on Microsoft! Stop making things so complicated.
Please just make the freaking standard open and available.

It's a 'standard', right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Y'know, I've been reading the comments on Slashdot for years now, and I've noticed that a lot of people tend to label anything Microsoft submits to ISO or SMPTE or ECMA or whomever as "evil". So I guess this begs the question: if and when one of these standards is actually ratified as a "standard", what makes it less of a standard than some other competing standard? ITU's H.264 vs SMPTE's VC-1 (better known as Windows Media Video 9)?

Re:It's a 'standard', right?

[MightyMartian]

It's not the standards issue that bothers us, but the licensing one. Well, actually, in the case of OOXML, it's more the fact that it's utterly useless, and without knowledge thus far not publicly document (ie. how Word 97 justifies), cannot be implemented.

Re:It's a 'standard', right?

[syrinx]

So I guess this begs the question

No, it doesn't. Don't use phrases if you don't know what they mean.

what makes it less of a standard than some other competing standard?

It might not be "less of a standard", but it might be a less useful standard standard anyway, due to restrictions placed on its use (see JPEG2000); Microsoft specifically has a record of trying to pull crap like that.

Re:It's a 'standard', right?

[plague3106]

It might not be "less of a standard", but it might be a less useful standard standard anyway, due to restrictions placed on its use (see JPEG2000); Microsoft specifically has a record of trying to pull crap like that.

Out of curiosity, exactly when did MS submit a standard and then sue over patent infringments?

Re:It's a 'standard', right?

[croddy]

Yes, mutually understood usage eventually becomes the standard. This, however, is not a reason to simply throw up our arms and say "oh well, popular usage eventually becomes the standard, LOLz!" It's a reason to recognize the fact that words and phrases already have commonly accepted documented meanings, and that if we wish to be understood clearly, we would do well to follow that established usage until it limits our ability to express things.

Abandoning the nuance of "to beg the question" in order to turn it into an ugly synonym for "to raise the question" doesn't expand our expressiveness. It doesn't create a new, useful sense for the phrase. It only discards the accepted meaning of the phrase, offers no replacement, and in the end, dilutes the expressiveness of our language.

As you point out, it is popular usage that will eventually decide the issue. That is all the more reason that we should actively resist those who would throw meaning in the garbage out of a simple unfamiliarity with the words they use. Teaching others how we use our language is an important tool for preserving its expressiveness.

Re:It's a 'standard', right?

[Trevahaha]

I'm curious too. I have never heard of a case, but people regularly say "they have a habit." The only thing I know Microsoft having a habit of doing is abandoning old technologies.

Re:It's a 'standard', right?

[Grishnakh]

I'm not sure if this qualifies, but FAT is probably one example. Now that FAT is being used for removable media everywhere, MS is trying to shake everyone down for patent license fees. However, I don't think MS ever actually submitted FAT to any standards committees; it was just a de facto standard.

RAMBUS is the prime example of submitting specs to become standards, and then suing over patent infringements, with SDRAM.

MS also recently has been pushing their encumbered OOXML to become a standard, even though the standard is incomplete and useless, just so they can divert attention away from ODF.

So in conclusion, MS may not have a record specifically of submitting standards and then suing over patent infringements, but they have a very long record of lots of other evil, anticompetitive actions and ploys, so any time they try to participate in public standards, they cannot be trusted. They've done far too much to destroy any trust.

Re:It's a 'standard', right?

[Wordsmith]

I don't disagree with anything you say in principle. But Syrinx was still being a jerk about it. And while I can't say definitively this applies to him/her, it seems the vast majority of the self-proclaimed grammar/language nazis are awfully selective in their objections; it's somehow cool and trendy to correct this technical mis-use, but many of them couldn't really speak intelligently about other idioms and issues of language.

Using the phrase correctly, and encouraging others to do so is one thing. Being crass and saying things like "No, it doesn't. Don't use phrases if you don't know what they mean" is just being an ass.

Re:It's a 'standard', right?

[wwahammy]

So they sued over FAT which wasn't a standard and they pushed OOXML as a standard even though many people don't feel its very good?

I fail to see how they've lost any "trust" when it comes to submitting standards for which they provide patents to. Isn't it better to have the largest OS manufacturer submit their standards so others can use them instead of Microsoft hiding them?

Wait... I forgot. This is Microsoft. Microsoft = evil. Microsoft could cure fucking cancer and people on Slashdot would complain that they didn't cure AIDS.

Re:It's a 'standard', right?

[Grishnakh]

Your last line proves you're just a stupid troll.

Submitting "standards" which are patent-encumbered isn't useful at all, just like providing a cure for AIDS isn't useful to the millions of Africans who have it if it costs them more money than they'll make in their whole lives.

And OOXML isn't just "not very good", it's absolutely worthless: the standard in many places just says "do what prior versions of Word do", and that part is undocumented. How is that a standard, troll? It's not, no more than instructions telling the supposed cure for cancer which say "now, for step 3, which is crucial, you need to do something which is secret and we won't tell you how".

Shouldn't you be working in your office in Redmond, instead of posting on Slashdot, troll?

Re:It's a 'standard', right?

[wwahammy]

Name calling huh? Impressive.

Based on our current (broken) patent system, pretty much any standard will be "patent encumbered." The best you can realistically hope for is that the holder of the patents agrees to not enforce them. That did not happen in the case of JPEG 2000 but it SEEMS (I don't have the details but let's just work on that assumption for now) Microsoft has agreed to do so. The agreement not to enforce is similar to the agreement for the 100-some patents held by Linux supporting companies who will only enforce the patents should any company, say Microsoft, enforce their patents against Linux. This is the way the current system works. You don't want "patent encumbered" standards? Change the fucking broken patent system. Any new standard you come out with will violate a patent of some sort considering the ease at which patents. If you want a standard that isn't anywhere near a patent, then use standards that are 16 years or older. That's your choice with the current system.

For OOXML I wouldn't go to the point of worthless but it certainly isn't very good. So don't use it and encourage others to not use it. It's one of two standards and if OOXML doesn't work and isn't open enough, use ODF.

The comment about cancer and AIDS wasn't meant to be taken literally. I just wanted to note how stupid the double standard is on Slashdot. If IBM said they'd offer a new image format as a standard and would agree not to enforce the patents on it, Slashdotters would celebrate their support of standards. In this case, Microsoft is castigated for doing the exact same thing. Blame Microsoft for DRM in their software blame them for abusive business practices or whatever else they do wrong. Don't blame them for doing what you would want and expect any other company to do.

Re:It's a 'standard', right?

[plague3106]

MS never submitted FAT as a standard.

RAMBUS has nothing to do with MS.

OOXML is what the default format for Office is (or is going to be) so I don't understand your claim of it being useless. I also seem to remember saying they wouldn't sue over it.

MS has done bad things in the past, but to say they'll never change (or haven't, for that matter) is just short sighted. MS isn't a person that you learn not to trust, they're a large company which many different political ideas fighting within it. You really need to learn to take things on a case by case basis.

Re:It's a 'standard', right?

[Grishnakh]

MS never submitted FAT as a standard.

Go re-read my prior post. I never said they did; I said it's a de facto standard, and now they're trying to shake companies down for license fees. It's part of their pattern.

RAMBUS has nothing to do with MS.

It's a prime example of bad business practices (submitting something as a standard and then suing for patent violations). It's the kind of thing MS would do if they got their crap approved as standards.

OOXML is what the default format for Office is (or is going to be) so I don't understand your claim of it being useless. I also seem to remember saying they wouldn't sue over it.

It's useless for everyone else. If they want to just keep it to themselves for use in MS Office, that's fine; so why are they going to ISO trying to get it approved as an "open standard", when it's anything but open?

A covenant not to sue is pretty worthless too, since they can just change their minds at any time.

MS has done bad things in the past, but to say they'll never change (or haven't, for that matter) is just short sighted. MS isn't a person that you learn not to trust, they're a large company which many different political ideas fighting within it. You really need to learn to take things on a case by case basis.

Wrong. MS is a person, actually two people and some henchmen. These two people have been running the company the whole time, so you absolutely can predict the company's future behavior based on its past behavior, just like you can predict a serial killer's behavior. There aren't different political ideas fighting within it; that's utterly ridiculous. Companies aren't democracies, they're dictatorships. Nothing high-level happens without the CEO's approval.

If MS ever gets totally different leadership, then it would make sense to give them the benefit of the doubt. But for now, the same two criminals are running the company who have always been running it, and to assume that they might change their behavior at any time is utter lunacy.

Re:It's a 'standard', right?

[plague3106]

Go re-read my prior post. I never said they did; I said it's a de facto standard, and now they're trying to shake companies down for license fees. It's part of their pattern.

It doesn't support the notion that MS submitted to a standards body and then sued over patent rights. A defacto standard is not a published standard. So if their pattern is sueing people that violate their patent (which they did NOT license anyone to use) then yes, it fits their pattern. It doesn't fit the pattern of pushing for a published standard and then sueing.

It's a prime example of bad business practices (submitting something as a standard and then suing for patent violations). It's the kind of thing MS would do if they got their crap approved as standards.

What RAMBUS did is irrelevent to what MS may or may not do. All you're doing is speculating.. and now its not even what MS has done, its based on what another unrelated company has done.

It's useless for everyone else. If they want to just keep it to themselves for use in MS Office, that's fine; so why are they going to ISO trying to get it approved as an "open standard", when it's anything but open?

If its useless I really doubt it'd get approved. Do you have other ISO approved standards that are useless to everyone but one company?

A covenant not to sue is pretty worthless too, since they can just change their minds at any time.

Not really, especially if they promised in writing. A judge very likely would consider that a binding contract to anyone that implements the standard.

Wrong. MS is a person, actually two people and some henchmen. These two people have been running the company the whole time, so you absolutely can predict the company's future behavior based on its past behavior, just like you can predict a serial killer's behavior. There aren't different political ideas fighting within it; that's utterly ridiculous. Companies aren't democracies, they're dictatorships. Nothing high-level happens without the CEO's approval.

Not true. Go research the internal politics of getting VS Express released as a free download. Its true that decisions need to be approved, but that doesn't mean that everyone in the company is in lock step and cannot sway the decision maker.

If MS ever gets totally different leadership, then it would make sense to give them the benefit of the doubt. But for now, the same two criminals are running the company who have always been running it, and to assume that they might change their behavior at any time is utter lunacy.

Sorry, that doesn't fly. MS is a publicly traded company, so saying two people run it is bull. Shareholders as a rule don't like lawsuits, especially when it can harm their stock. MS also would probably rather spend money on other things than defending itself against more lawsuits. It doesn't make business sense to stir up more anti-trust suits.

Re:It's a 'standard', right?

[Grishnakh]

Are you an MS employee?

It doesn't support the notion that MS submitted to a standards body and then sued over patent rights. A defacto standard is not a published standard. So if their pattern is sueing people that violate their patent (which they did NOT license anyone to use) then yes, it fits their pattern. It doesn't fit the pattern of pushing for a published standard and then sueing.

It supports the notion that they are unfriendly to free and open standards, and like to get license fees out of people for trivial patents.

Sorry, that doesn't fly. MS is a publicly traded company, so saying two people run it is bull. Shareholders as a rule don't like lawsuits, especially when it can harm their stock. MS also would probably rather spend money on other things than defending itself against more lawsuits. It doesn't make business sense to stir up more anti-trust suits.

You're living in a fantasy world. MS has been run by the same two guys since it started--look it up. One of those guys owns so much stock that nothing that shareholders do will unseat him. Shareholder revolts are extremely rare at any company, but MS is the last place they'd ever happen. And anti-trust suits aren't a problem for MS: antitrust is a criminal matter, not civil, and the DoJ has already shown they're not interested in pursuing anti-trust action against anyone, especially MS. MS has nothing to fear in the antitrust department. Even if they did, the cost of the lawsuit is less then the money to be gained by putting competitors out of business.

Re:It's a 'standard', right?

[plague3106]

Are you an MS employee?

No I work for a small medical research company. However I do feel that if I come up with something i should get to decide how or if I license it.

It supports the notion that they are unfriendly to free and open standards, and like to get license fees out of people for trivial patents.

I think the fact that they are trying to publish standards says otherwise. You do whatever you like with your standards, but there's nothing wrong with a firm developing thier own standards for their own systems. There was no reason for anyone that was using FAT w/o a license to do so, as you can use cdfs or ext2/3 on a floppy, and I'm sure there's a host of others. If you have a problem with the patent system thats one thing, but aside from this one case of suing someone that used a patented technology wihtout a license there's no bases to say that MS makes a habit of patenting something, getting it as an approved standard and then sueing implementors.

You're living in a fantasy world. MS has been run by the same two guys since it started--look it up. One of those guys owns so much stock that nothing that shareholders do will unseat him. Shareholder revolts are extremely rare at any company, but MS is the last place they'd ever happen. And anti-trust suits aren't a problem for MS: antitrust is a criminal matter, not civil, and the DoJ has already shown they're not interested in pursuing anti-trust action against anyone, especially MS. MS has nothing to fear in the antitrust department. Even if they did, the cost of the lawsuit is less then the money to be gained by putting competitors out of business.

Sorry, its you thats living in a fantasy world. You cannot come up with any examples of MS submitting something as a standard and then suing over patent infringment. All you have are lame "M$ is the suxx1!!1!" arguments.

You realize that the other 49% (or whatever the % is) of MS shareholders could still sue if the stocks took hit because of a blatently dangerous tactic. You're also a nut if you think that MS couldn't get into anymore trouble with anti trust problems. Get your head out of your ass and join us in the real world.

Specs look good, what about the license?

[BrookHarty]

Seems the specs are pretty good, But what about the license?

Are we going to have the same initial jpeg 2000 issues with licenses? Sounds like another license scam, its not free for consumers, there are submarine patents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_2000 check the License Issues section...

Re:Specs look good, what about the license?

[bunratty]

Wikipedia has this to say:

JPEG 2000 is by itself not license-free, but the contributing companies and organizations agreed that licenses for its first part -- the core coding system -- can be obtained free of charge from all contributors.

The JPEG committee has stated:

It has always been a strong goal of the JPEG committee that its standards should be implementable in their baseline form without payment of royalty and license fees ... The up and coming JPEG 2000 standard has been prepared along these lines, and agreement reached with over 20 large organizations holding many patents in this area to allow use of their intellectual property in connection with the standard without payment of license fees or royalties.

However, the JPEG committee has also noted that undeclared and obscure submarine patents may still present a hazard:

It is of course still possible that other organizations or individuals may claim intellectual property rights that affect implementation of the standard, and any implementers are urged to carry out their own searches and investigations in this area.

So JPEG 2000 may be implemented for free. Why would it not be free for consumers?

As for submarine patents, there may be submarine patents. There may also be submarine patents for HD Photo. I would think submarine patents would present less of a problem for the older standard, JPEG 2000, because the patents have had longer to expire.

Re:Will be obsolete

[astonish]

The specs have both 16 and 32-bit per channel ranges. 128-bit floating point colour is pretty high dynamic range I'd say.

Re:"Nothing for you to see here; please move along

[chimpo13]

It looks fine on my lynx.

transfer all control or forget it

[DriveDog]

If MS gives away all rights to the format spec and any algorithms required to use it, fine. JPEG can declare particular implementations in compliance or not. Otherwise, no way.

Oh God! Of course it's a big deal.

[twitter]

This is as big a deal as pictures. M$ is sure to make this one of those awefull non-standards like ACPI, MTP and a host of other. Want to bet their idea of a no charge "implementation" is a NDA protected SDK? They will then force it onto any camera makers who care to have their devices work with Windoze in the future. Then they will sabotage the alternatives so that their "captive" audience will have trouble sharing pictures with everyone else and themselves. In the worst of cases, there will be dozens of incompatible implementations, all guarded by a M$ patent, that leave people's photo albums locked down.

What, me cynical? Hell yes, and the evidence is in your face. If jpeg 2000 is not good enough, there's PNG. If M$ cared to improve imaging, they would simply surrender their patents and let others improve existing standards. But no, they don't like free formats and will do everything in their power to crush them.

Let's just hope this bad idea dies with Vista.

Here's the specification

[Anonymous Coward]

The specification is available at http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/wmphoto.mspx to look at.

Here's the text of what you need to agree to in order to download the specification. It doesn't seem particularly bad except the patent bit. It remains to be seen if the JPEG changes actually clear that up.

Microsoft Corporation Technical Documentation License Agreement for the specification "HD Photo"

READ THIS! THIS IS A LEGAL AGREEMENT BETWEEN MICROSOFT CORPORATION ("MICROSOFT") AND THE RECIPIENT OF THE ABOVE REFERENCED MATERIALS, WHETHER AN INDIVIDUAL OR AN ENTITY ("YOU"). IF YOU HAVE ACCESSED THIS AGREEMENT IN THE PROCESS OF DOWNLOADING THESE MATERIALS ("MATERIALS") FROM A MICROSOFT WEB SITE, BY CLICKING "I ACCEPT", DOWNLOADING, USING OR PROVIDING FEEDBACK ON THE MATERIALS, YOU AGREE TO THESE TERMS. IF THIS AGREEMENT IS ATTACHED TO MATERIALS, BY ACCESSING, USING OR PROVIDING FEEDBACK ON THE ATTACHED MATERIALS, YOU AGREE TO THESE TERMS. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THESE TERMS, YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO ACCESS, DOWNLOAD, USE OR REVIEW THE MATERIALS.

For good and valuable consideration, the receipt and sufficiency of which are acknowledged, You and Microsoft agree as follows:

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 ("Microsoft Product") as described in these Materials; and (b) to provide feedback on these Materials to Microsoft. All other rights are retained by Microsoft; this Agreement does not give You rights under any Microsoft patents. You may not (i) duplicate any part of these Materials, (ii) remove this Agreement or any notices from these Materials, or (iii) give any part of these Materials, or assign or otherwise provide Your rights under this Agreement, to anyone else.

2. These Materials may contain preliminary information or inaccuracies, and may not correctly represent any associated Microsoft Product as commercially released. All Materials are provided entirely "AS IS." To the extent permitted by law, MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, DISCLAIMS ALL EXPRESS, IMPLIED AND STATUTORY WARRANTIES, AND ASSUMES NO LIABILITY TO YOU FOR ANY DAMAGES OF ANY TYPE IN CONNECTION WITH THESE MATERIALS OR ANY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN THEM.

3. If You are an entity and (a) merge into another entity or (b) a controlling ownership interest in You changes, Your right to use these Materials automatically terminates and You must destroy them.

4. You have no obligation to give Microsoft any suggestions, comments or other feedback ("Feedback") relating to these Materials. However, any Feedback you voluntarily provide may be used in Microsoft Products and related specifications or other documentation (collectively, "Microsoft Offerings") which in turn may be relied upon by other third parties to develop their own products, services or technology ("Third Party Products"). Accordingly, if You do give Microsoft Feedback on any version of these Materials or the Microsoft Offerings to which they apply, You agree: (a) Microsoft may freely use, reproduce, license, distribute, and otherwise commercialize Your Feedback in any Microsoft Offering; (b) You also grant third parties, without charge, only those patent rights necessary to enable Third Party Products to use, implement or interface with any specific parts of a Microsoft Product that incorporate Your Feedback; and (c) You will not give Microsoft any Feedback (i) that You have reason to believe is subject to any patent, copyright or other intellectual property claim or right of any third party; or (ii) subject to license terms which seek to require any Microsoft Offering incorporating or derived from such Feedback, or other Microsoft intellectual property, to be licensed to or otherwise shared with any third party.

5. Microsoft has no obligation to maintain the confidentiality of any Microsoft

What we don't know is the problem

[erroneus]

I don't care that it's Microsoft. Here's what I care about:

Patented? Yes, so it's a problem
If patented, Royalties or License restrictions? We see no royalties, but what about license restrictions? Is it OSS friendly or will it not work within Firefox legally?
Is it effective or does it offer anything we don't already have? I don't know...

Whatever is the next big format

[jshriverWVU]

There is a simple truth that has to be made, it has to be 100% open and 100% free of patent infringment, so there's nothing to come back and bite people in the rear. To bad the ogg people dont work on this.

MS patents

[SillySilly]

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.

Re:MS patents

[Lotunggim Ginsawat]

No, it is not necessarily have to be free, it is just have to be not too expensive and also must not be exclusive. Those who wants to license those patents should be able to get it.

PNG

[SolusSD]

With the amount of memory imaging devices (digital camera, etc) have these days why not go a lossless compression route, like png? PNGs support alpha transparencies, layers, etc and it is a completely open standard.

Re:PNG

[Lehk228]

because camera sensors are getting bigger and alpha is fucking useless to a photographer. what color light should the sensor assign to the alpha channel?

Re:PNG

[Entropius]

PNG doesn't compress photographs that well... ... and jpegs from the camera are already pretty big. 4MB for an 8-10 million pixel image?

Re:PNG

[SEAL]

Flash memory on a camera isn't a problem for storage size, but it is a problem for write speed. Most cameras use an intermediate buffer of more expensive memory that is then written out to the flash card. So you may have to wait a second or two after shooting a few pictures. That's one of the reasons why certain models (Canon 1Ds Mark II or whatever they're calling it these days) cost so much -- because of number of rapid-fire shots they can take.

That said, most of the higher end cameras support a RAW format as an optional setting, for lossless images.

It's A Trap. EULA to view the specs

[mpapet]

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)

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. ...You may not (i) duplicate any part of these Materials
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.

How much do you want to bet that

[wamerocity]

this standard is going to come with a way to put DRM in photos that can only be viewed with licenses, just like some WMV files? The porn industry would be all over that, and I'd bet they are financially backing them. It would be so easy to implement, especially with all the DRM-friendly coding that has gone into the Vista kernel.

Mark my words, M$ is looking for a way to put DRM in EVERY conceivable form of media. I've read articles about HARDWARE implementations that make moving of certain file types (mp3's, avi's) and other files that are not locked by DRM, to become locked. They have their own Audio and Video DRM, they are working on photo's, and soon the version of office will include DRM for all documents, spreadsheets and the like.

You'll see..

Re:How much do you want to bet that

[Wingsy]

I was going to post the same sentiments. And if I knew how to UNmod him as a troll, I would. It's gonna happen, "you'll see".

Ditto what wamerocity said.

Re:How much do you want to bet that

[wamerocity]

Thank you. I'm not one for conspiracy theory- I don't believe M$ wants to take over the world or anything stupid like that, but Microsoft is a corporation that DOES NOT HAVE responsibilities to the consumer. They have a responsibility to shareholders, and to make money (Insert Sean Penn quote from Team America). If you or me are unsatisfied with Vista, they don't give a flying fuck. It only makes a difference if you don't end up purchasing their software, but everyone always does, because most people are stuck in a comfortability rut.

Microsoft isn't stupid. They know that Vista is the equivalent of Millennium Edition and people only buy it cause they are limited in options. They know very well that there are FINALLY becoming more viable options for a choice of OS in the desktop market. The SMARTEST thing you could do from a business sense is to lock down every format they everyone is entrenched into and make it too difficult for them to switch to the other OS's.

Re:How much do you want to bet that

[qualidafial]

To "unmod" him you need to have moderator points, which are randomly distributed to logged in users.

Also the fact that you submitted a comment prevents you from moderating other comments in the same story.

Deja GIF.

[Spy der Mann]

If there are restrictions, Microsoft's HD photo will go the way of the GIF format.

Re:Deja GIF.

[Brian Gordon]

You're right- what's the big deal anyway? We don't have to use jpeg.. lossless compression is better anyway, especially in this era of 700gb hard drives and verizon fios

Re:Deja GIF.

[damiam]

As in, insanely popular and used all over the web?

Re:Deja GIF.

[omeomi]

If there are restrictions, Microsoft's HD photo will go the way of the GIF format.

Websites still use gif quite a bit. And the patents have expired, so there's no real reason not to anymore...Personally, I prefer png, but for some reason png hasn't really caught on. I imagine because graphic design schools break web graphics up into 2 categories, full-color jpg, and line-art gif.

Re:Deja GIF.

[Asmor]

Unrelated, and really just for my own edification/laziness...

Where does PNG fit into the paraidgm? I mean, I know it's got more advanced alpha transparency than gif, and I think that it's based on plain ol' bitmaps as opposed to compression, so it seems like a strict successor to GIF...

However, gif still has some legs up on it, namely ubiquity and the fact that animated PNGs support doesn't seem to be remotely common.

So is this basically correct? Anything I'm missing?

Re:Deja GIF.

[hjf]

Photoshop has always given best results compressing in either GIF or JPEG. I use PNGs only when I need an alpha channel (because GIF transparency it's really out of date), and for that it works great. I don't care if it renders differently in IE. People who would notice that, would use firefox (or opera, whatever) already. People who use IE, wouldn't tell the difference anyway.

Re:Deja GIF.

[thadman08]

Also the fact that Internet Explorer didn't support PNG alpha transparency didn't help. At least IE7 finally does.

Re:Deja GIF.

[omeomi]

Photoshop has always given best results compressing in either GIF or JPEG.

I don't have the most recent version of Photoshop, but from my own observation, Fireworks has always seemed to handle PNG better than Photoshop...maybe because it uses PNG as it's native file format.

Re:Deja GIF.

[omeomi]

Also the fact that Internet Explorer didn't support PNG alpha transparency didn't help. At least IE7 finally does.

Hey, it only took them 10 years...what do you expect from Microsoft... ;-)

Re:Deja GIF.

[FLEB]

I think the biggest setback to PNG was lousy support in Internet Explorer during a time of rapid Internet growth and solidification. Even though 8-bit PNG was rather trouble-free, the whole format had a "new and iffy" feel to it. Indexed, single-color transparency worked well, but in that case there were few clearly visible advantages to PNG (true, it's better compression, but it's not like PNG24/JPEG, where you can clearly see lack of JPEG crud). Also, there's still no standard browser support for MNG, so GIF has an advantage with 89a animation.

Although PNG has good compression over something like TIFF or BMP for full-color images, it's still a poor choice for posting large photos to the Web, as its lossless compression results in unwieldly file sizes while maximum (and adequate) quality JPEGs do much better.

Re:Deja GIF.

[mark-t]

If PNG had supported animations the way GIF does, it would have probably all but killed GIF completely. I know there were a couple of attempts at standardizing animation formats that used PNG as an underlying picture format (MNG and APNG come to mind), but I believe it was a serious oversight on the part of the original PNG developers to not define a standard for at least some sort of successive frame-based animation (sort of like GIF) as part of the core spec.

Re:Deja GIF.

[LionMage]

I'm one of the co-authors of the PNG spec, so I will give my answers to your questions. I can't claim to speak for the other PNG spec authors.

Where does PNG fit into the [paradigm]? I mean, I know it's got more advanced alpha transparency than gif, and I think that it's based on plain ol' bitmaps as opposed to compression, so it seems like a strict successor to GIF...

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.

However, gif still has some legs up on it, namely ubiquity and the fact that animated PNGs support doesn't seem to be remotely common.

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).

Re:Deja GIF.

[OldeTimeGeek]

As most still cameras support only jpeg, you're pretty much stuck. They're the ones that processing speed and memory requirements affect most directly. When you get the images off of the camera, you can store them in any format that you want.

Re:Deja GIF.

[LionMage]

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.

Re:Deja GIF.

[LionMage]

Actually, IE 5.x on Mac OS X had full PNG alpha channel support, with compositing and everything. It was one of the browsers with which you could showcase pages like this one.

Re:Deja GIF.

[Anonymous Coward]

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. Not to pick nits (but I will), but jpeg - even the pre-2000 standard - has capability for lossless compression. I have only seen it used in DICOM (radiologist's) format. It's a Huffman compression scheme. From what I've read it did not get adopted too heavily because it's relatively low compression results.

Also, before we get too paranoid, keep in mind that jpeg is not a file format (technically). The standard describes it as a way for forming a serial data stream out of 2D image data. Yes, there is a way to easily turn this into a file format, but if you had to write your own file format, I think we'd all could come up with a more versitile structure than jpeg.

Re:Deja GIF.

[ender-]

As most still cameras support only jpeg, you're pretty much stuck. They're the ones that processing speed and memory requirements affect most directly. When you get the images off of the camera, you can store them in any format that you want. What Microsoft is trying to do is make their HD Photo into the new standard, with the goal being to get the Digital Camera makers to use HD Photo as their new default format on-camera.
There's no proof yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if their hope is to let devices create HD Photo's freely, but control the market of software designed to manipulate them.

Re:Deja GIF.

[mikael]

Earlier Nikon Cameras supported uncompressed TIFF (Coolpix 850), then Nikon realised that this was a "value-added" feature, and only provided JPEG export.

Re:Deja GIF.

[Skapare]

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).

And this was known (because I posted it) back when PNG was becoming a new standard. The design of PNG would even make it easy to have a rudimentary animation facility (that's all that would have been needed to bump GIF). Yet it wasn't done. What a missed opportunity. What a historical screwup. Well, OK, it wasn't your fault, I presume. Do you know whose fault it is?

Re:Deja GIF.

[neur0maniak]

Why would someone who chose a Mac, then choose to use Internet Explorer?

Actually, I don't understand why microsoft supports mac os at all... They've not supported linux.

Re:Deja GIF.

[larry bagina]

my experience has been that Fireworks compresses gif better than equivalent png files, but running them through pngcrush beats gif.

Re:Deja GIF.

[Oktober Sunset]

you mean animated ones will annoy the crap out of everyone on myspace?

Re:Deja GIF.

[cheater512]

Unisys got everyone worried about 2 years too late. If they had struck earlier they would have had a bigger impact.

You'll find that many art schools break web graphics in to full color gif and line art jpeg actually.
I see it all the time. :(

Re:Deja GIF.

[dangitman]

because you can do almost everything that TIFF can do, but with less complexity

Not supporting clipping paths (vectors) seems to fall well short of "almost all" that TIFF can do. It's a pretty major omission. Another question - does PNG handle CMYK images? Color profiles? Those are a pretty big deal, too.

Re:Deja GIF.

[Ilgaz]

Why would someone who chose a Mac, then choose to use Internet Explorer?

Actually, I don't understand why microsoft supports mac os at all... They've not supported linux. Well Apple paid them. :) Yes, they paid MS to code IE for Mac and stuff I detail below could have something to do with it.

If MS coded IE/Windows like they did as IE/Mac, sitting in its own directory, not messing system and tries to comform current standards as much as possible, Mozilla wouldn't exist now.

IE for Mac has nothing to do with Windows version except name and couple of text encoding (win-1252) evil MS tricks. To explain you better, it came with a full feature download manager, colorsync support and even ebay etc. bidding watch.

Of course it is not maintained anymore and a complete security/stability risk now. I am just trying to explain why you still see Mac users referencing it. Using Mac doesn't mean hating everything MS produces. In fact, their Office is one of the very good apps they produced. I really don't care about loud mouth fanatics so I basically reference "versiontracker" top downloads and Amazon.com top selling Mac software. That is the reality, real World.

The Mac scene is different. Real Player gets good reviews, MSN Messenger is one of the top downloaded apps, people still download/use Netscape because they have nothing to do with Windows versions. They never did.

Re:Deja GIF.

[jZnat]

Back in the day, IE 5.0 was the best web browser on Mac OS. Strange, I know, but it used to be like that. Now it's an outdated pile of crap in comparison to Safari, Firefox/Camino, Opera (which is gratis nowadays), etc.

Re:Deja GIF.

[qualidafial]

you mean animated ones will annoy the crap out of everyone on myspace? Sorry, did you just admit *out loud* that you visit myspace?

Re:Deja GIF.

[OldeTimeGeek]

They still do, just on the DSLRs. My Nikon D200 can write TIFF, jpeg and Camera RAW.

Re:Deja GIF.

[StikyPad]

PNG doesn't support animation at all. The animated sister format is MNG.

The problem with OSS has always been the names. "Pang" and "mung" are just horrible. Granted, a JPEG sounds like something you wouldn't want to use in a round hole, but at least it doesn't have pre-existing connotations of yuckiness.

Re:Deja GIF.

[drew]

Meaning that it will still be supported and used far more often than any of the much more advanced competing formats, despite numerous significant shortcomings and a restrictive license enforced by a litigious corporation?

I think we could all do with a few less file formats going the way of the GIF format...

Re:Deja GIF.

[bluephone]

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). GIF animation is limited, but perfect for the use case. MNG is using a sledge where a flyswatter is needed. PNG had a very good opportunity to leave no reason to still use GIF with APNG, and AFAIK, there was a pretty clear rejection of APNG with the chunk name proposal being voted down. GIF didn't kill MPEG, APNG wouldn't kill MNG, but it's rejected nonetheless.

Re:Deja GIF.

[Kalriath]

It didn't used to be. Some time ago, Unisys sent a royalty claim to Compuserve (inventors of GIF) based on the GIF format's usage of their patented LZW algorithm (why it is possible to patent algorithms is a mystery - maths shouldn't be patentable) who then, having no other way to pay the outrageous amount, began claiming royalties for any use of GIF images on the internet. I believe it was as a result of this that PNG was initially created.

These days one is always wary of new image formats (or any new format for that matter) produced by a corporation.

Re:Deja GIF.

[UserGoogol]

It's pronounced ping though, which is fairly pleasing to my ears.

Re:Deja GIF.

[EggyToast]

Most earlier cameras did, but it took a very, very long time to save to the format. As such, very few users ever tried the feature after using it once, and those that did use it realized that a new, 3 or 5mp camera would take inherently better pictures, even saving to jpg. I can't imagine how long it would take to save a 5mp picture to tiff, let alone what it would do to battery life. These little point/click cameras are not known for their speedy chips.

Re:Deja GIF.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to nitpick, but he did mention "bog-standard" jpeg. You even quoted it.

Re:Deja GIF.

[EggyToast]

It's only because Photoshop will whack down the color palette for GIFs when you use Save for Web. A PNG with the same color index will inherently be smaller than a GIF.

BUT! It took me some experimenting to see that this was the case. Photoshop has a tendency to increase the color palette when you open an indexed gif and try to save it as a PNG. Use the same palette, or use Save for Web, though, and the PNG will be smaller than an otherwise equivalent GIF.

Re:Deja GIF.

[Moridineas]

I couldn't help you showed up for me as a slashdot "friend of a friend."

I also noticed that graphic file lives at http://images.slashdot.org/fof.gif

The ad currently on my screen is for "Dice" and is http://m1.2mdn.net/viewad/982522/dice_q107_money_7 28x90_NT.gif

Seems like most of the other slashdot graphics are pngs, but there are still plenty of gifs around!

Re:Deja GIF.

[David Gerard]

PNG is the preferred lossless image format on Wikipedia (#9 website in the world), and in fact people go around converting GIFs to PNGs. The only use for GIFs is animations (because no-one supports MNG). This gives PNGs a large viewing audience.

Re:Deja GIF.

[David Gerard]

I believe MNG support was removed from Mozilla because it was almost unused and they didn't like the code. An extension is available, but it's pretty much a dead format.

Re:Deja GIF.

[Oktober Sunset]

I did it for science, I was like an anthropologist observing the primitive tribes folk. I can tell you, they were more savage and animal-like than any cannibals or head hunters.

Re:Deja GIF.

[hjf]

That's what I tried, I mean, I always use the "save for web" tool, which is great. Is there where I get smaller GIFs than PNGs. The problem is that Photoshop only allows to sabe 8-bit or 24-bit PNGs, while GIFs allows indexing down to 1 color, if needed (to make, say, a spacer. Not that I ever used those! But before CSS these were very popular).

Maybe I can index PNG's pallette, didn't actually look in depth for that. But I'll try next time.

Re:Deja GIF.

[EggyToast]

Yeah, you can select an index of colors -- last time I checked, you can even select the bits used in the PNG. The problem is that photoshop is too specific about it. It'll save GIFs indexed to the "best fit" colors automatically. It should be able to do the same for PNGs, but it doesn't, forcing users to do it manually. And most won't bother, when GIF is right there.

Re:Deja GIF.

[Bert64]

It's more to do with the fact that IE was very late to supporting PNG, and much later to supporting it properly (only IE7 supports png translucency i believe).

Re:Deja GIF.

[Bert64]

I believe older versions of firefox did support MNG, but then that code was removed for some reason (and noone noticed because there arent any sites out there using MNG animations)

Re:Deja GIF.

[innocent_white_lamb]

http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/

Re:Deja GIF.

[StikyPad]

Well sure, just like FU is foo, but most english speakers are going to think of something else.

How does this compare to OpenEXR?

[steveha]

Would someone who understands these issues please explain how this standard is similar and different to OpenEXR?

http://www.openexr.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEXR

Is OpenEXR more computationally expensive? (In other words, would the Microsoft format allow for longer battery life and shorter time interval between taking pictures?)

Actually, are there any cameras available that can capture to OpenEXR? If not, perhaps that's a clue.

Re:How does this compare to OpenEXR?

[Jerry Coffin]

Would someone who understands these issues please explain how this standard is similar and different to OpenEXR?

A typical digital camera arranges pixels in what's called a Bayer pattern. A typical pattern is green-red-green-blue, repeated across the image, with a one-pixel offset between rows. Note, in particular, that this means there are two green pixels for every red or blue pixel (mostly because the eye is more sensitive in the green range than red or blue). FWIW, cameras that use the Foveon sensors (e.g. Fuji's) are different: they actually have red, green and blue components for each pixel -- this is why you sometimes see them quoted as having extremely high resolutions like 20+ megapixels.

In OpenEXR, each pixel has three components: red, green and blue. Software has to take the original Bayer pattern data and convert it to this format. This involves quite a bit of interpretation on the part of the software -- i.e. there's quite a bit more than one possible way to do the job. In fact, if you look carefully, there are currently quite a few different programs out there for converting camera raw files into normal formats -- each camera manufacturer supplies their own, Adobe includes a camera raw converter with Photoshop, and then there are things like Apple Aperture, Adobe Lightroom, Bibble Pro, Capture One and Silverfast (and others I can't think of at the moment). These vary in their ability to remove artifacts, noise and so on -- for example, Bibble Pro is really good at dealing with noisy images. To do this job as well as possible, they use not only metadata from the original image, but also (in some cases) separate files to tell them about distortion and/or color shifts in particular lenses.

The bottom line is that there is not a single "right" way to convert the raw image into a format like OpenEXR. Quite the contrary, virtually any/every such conversion involves throwing away some of the original information, and takes some judgment to decide exactly which original data to keep and which to throw, as well as exactly how to combine what is kept.

Re:How does this compare to OpenEXR?

[Jerry Coffin]

Hmm...rereading that, I'm not sure what I was thinking of -- both OpenEXR and HD Photo (or whatever you prefer to call it) are post-processing formats, so most of what I said just doesn't apply here. I apologize.

Re:How does this compare to OpenEXR?

[steveha]

Re-reading TFA, it looks like this new spec is intended for two uses: capture by cameras (as a RAW format) and general high-definition photos. OpenEXR can be used for the latter, but it currently won't work as a RAW format.

So, I guess my question is better asked as two questions:

Does this new format have any advantages over OpenEXR as a general photo format?

Does it make sense to try to extend OpenEXR to be a RAW image capture format?

steveha

Re:Oh, I've got a suggestion as well

[Mattintosh]

Oh, trauma to the groin, boys
Trauma to the groin
Nothing's quite as funny
As a trauma to the groin
There is no wit more pretty
There is no joke divine
Or limerick as witty
As a trauma to the groin

- Heywood Banks

Re:Oh God! Of course it's a big deal.

[Chandon Seldon]

It's entirely possible that Microsoft could offer reasonable patent licensing terms. They do, for example, with the SOAP specification.

Don't wreck it...

[flar2]

I just want to be able to take pictures with my camera, load them on any computer, edit them with any application, share them with anybody I want however I want, all without having to worry about politics, patents, payments or compatibility. This is pretty much what we have now. If anyone were to wreck it, I'll have to throw my computer in the trash and go back to film.

Re:Oh, I've got a suggestion as well

[Mattintosh]

Whoops... Make that ending "Or limerick delicious as a trauma to the groin". Damn my brain and its incessant filling-in of the wrong words!

Re:JPEG 2000

[Spy der Mann]

Did patents kill it?

Yes, they did. I remember this software, Irfanview, that allows you to read JP2 files. Oh, but to write them, you had to license ($buy$) the extension to be able to write in formats bigger than 640x480.

The result: Nobody gave a dime for Jpeg2000.

To put it in other words, patents (or licensing restrictions, actually) are the bane of image formats. Put a tiny restriction on the format, and people will go for a free unencumbered one. Like what happened with GIF and PNG.

JPEG2000

[KeepQuiet]

Actually there is a JPEG successor: JPEG2000, a wavelet coder, but it never took off. I personally think there are two reasons: 1) Well JPEG is good enough for most people. The efficient implementations are vast. There is little need for change for both the consumer and the industry. 2) Patent issues. So even JPEG2000 is not yet accepted, will this new format work? TFA says it requires less computationally power. Do anyone have any benchmarks?

Re:JPEG 2000

[njfuzzy]

I blame the stupid version name.

it's A Trap

[asphaltjesus]

The spec is publicly available. I'm not sure how this interacts with the EULA: http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:IHRfofXSXt4J:d ownload.microsoft.com/download/1/6/a/16acc601-1b7a -42ad-8d4e-4f0aa156ec3e/HDPhoto_v10.doc+HD+Photo+u ses+an+advanced+compression+scheme,+there+is+no+si mple+way+for+applications+to+directly+access+speci fic+portions+of+the+stored+photo+data+other+than+t hrough+the+appropriate+codec+interfaces.&hl=en&ct= clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a

The API that provides this spec is probably proprietary and will be jealously guarded.

HD Photo uses an advanced compression scheme, there is no simple way for applications to directly access specific portions of the stored photo data other than through the appropriate codec interfaces.

Rather than use a series of metadata tags to attempt to describe the attributes of an image's structure, HD Photo uses a unique GUID to provide a non-ambiguous definition of the image pixel format.

Re:it's A Trap

[RegularFry]

Or alternatively, we could do a little research and find the sample code that MS have released for writing a codec. Admittedly, the licence on the example code precludes including exactly that code in a GPL'd project, but a reimplementation looks to be clear... hardly "jealously guarded".

Honestly, MS are behaving oddly with this one. It's technically a good standard, they've backed down from a restrictive licence scheme they were going to use, and they've showed everybody how to use it. I can't help wondering what they're up to...

Re:It's A Trap. EULA to view the specs

[Applekid]

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 Where do you see that exclusion? If you're downloading details on HD Photo, that's a Microsoft specification. Your product, service, or technology will be interfacing with a steam of binary data which is expected to be in the proper format i.e. adhering to specification.

You may not (i) duplicate any part of these Materials Okay I won't. But how does my engineering group work with the spec if I can't duplicate it? "Hey, guys, go to http://microsoft.com/really_neat_spec and download it for review."

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. *sigh* In this litigious society, some smart-ass might report a bug or request an enchancement. Microsoft might get it and implement a fix or the added feature. Smart-ass might get the brilliant idea of filing suit against Microsoft for stealing his idea. It's a CYA move.

There's PLENTY wrong with Microsoft spearheading a format and being very active in getting it consumed as a world standard. We'd do well to avoid it since it's basically steps two and three of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish." Why should they embrace something when the rest of the industry will handle the leg work of getting the Embrace phase down?

It's bad on it's merits alone. FUDing it up doesn't help anyone.

Not really suitable for raw camera images

[AaronW]

Taking a quick glance at Microsoft's HDPhoto standard it looks like it is not really suitable for capturing raw image data for cameras.

In a digital camera, a pixel is red, green, blue and sometimes additional colors laid out in a pattern that can differ from camera to camera. A pixel is not RGB (unless it's a Fovon sensor), so standard lossless formats like PNG or TIFF won't work. HDPhoto supports N color channels and more than 8 bits per color, but I do not see support for the raw CCD data, which is usually not RGB, but R, G, or B (sometimes with additional colors).

I like to preserve my pictures in RAW format since as time goes by, the algorithms to convert the image to a RGB image suitable for displaying keep improving. Also, when editing my photos, some of the processing is done on the raw data before converting it to RGB. Raw data helps for things like noise filtering, for example, since the noise filtering software can be aware of the camera's CCD properties (Noise Ninja, for example, has profiles for my camera at different ISO settings).

The only problem with current raw photos is that each manufacturer seems to have their own format which is incompatible with other manufacturers, or even incompatible between different cameras. It would be nice if they could standardize on something like OpenRAW.

Now, as much as I dislike Microsoft, I think this could be good for regular photos since the compression is about as good as Jpeg2000 (assuming Microsoft isn't spreading FUD) but with a much faster encoding/decoding speed. This could also be a good format for most people taking pictures (who are happy with JPEG).

-Aaron

Re:Not really suitable for raw camera images

[asphaltjesus]

Think Apple's Aperture. The file becomes part of a bigger work flow if one of them is implemented correctly.

Re:Not really suitable for raw camera images

[fireboy1919]

Sounds like the master format for native camera usage should store a palette to specify each kind of filter in front of the images, a transformation that converts from array coordinates into however the coordinates are actually laid out (including which filter is over which point), and an array of intensity values (i.e. grayscale).

That should specify each possible output accurately and allow for a huge amount of compression (at least huge for lossless compression).

Re:Not really suitable for raw camera images

[noidentity]

"I like to preserve my pictures in RAW format since as time goes by, the algorithms to convert the image to a RGB image suitable for displaying keep improving."

And I imagine there is no best algorithm for all purposes, since the process of converting to plain RGB pixels is inherently lossy.

"Raw data helps for things like noise filtering, for example, since the noise filtering software can be aware of the camera's CCD properties"

Also, I imagine that bad pixel compensation can better be done on the raw data (or perhaps most current digital cameras are "trained" in the factory to their CCD's unique defects?).

Re:Not really suitable for raw camera images

[AaronW]

Correct. Plus chromatic aberration and other things can also be better processed before the RGB conversion as well.

Re:Not really suitable for raw camera images

[AaronW]

A number of cameras have support for dealing with hot pixels and dust on the sensor. Also, as you say, some conversion algorithms are better than others. dcraw, for example, results in a bit sharper conversion than the in-camera or vendor's raw processing software for my camera and the workflow software I use is based on this for it's raw conversion.

Some cameras also have weird pixel layouts. Fuji's SuperCCD, for example, uses hexagonal pixels, and each pixel is actually two, a large and a small one to increase dynamic range. Then there's Kodak who is showing off support for a RGBW filter, where instead of RGBG they replace one of the green pixels with a white pixel.

-Aaron

Re:FP

[RegularFry]

Indeed it is. They've released reference code.

That's easy...

[Valdrax]

Wow! The image compression used by Microsoft's HD Photo format is so good that it can reduce any image down to 0 bits!

It's decompression that's always been the sticky part.

Re:That's easy...

[turing_m]

After they get that working they can start on cryonics.

Re:JPEG 2000

[edwdig]

Like what happened with GIF and PNG.

Most people didn't care about the GIF patents. Adobe paid the licensing fee so Photoshop could write GIFs and most people didn't notice.

People switched to PNGs when internet connections got faster and the average user started using high color depths, 256 color GIFs unattractive compared to true color PNGs.

Is this a big of an issue as ODF/OOXML?

[Dancindan84]

No, not really. In this case Microsoft is pushing a format that is apparently decent and even has advantages over the competition. In the case of ODF/OOXML they're pushing an "open" format that is not truly open that could cause interoperability problems with other software (which goes against the entire point of an open file format).

Re:FP

[RegularFry]

Specs, licence and example code are here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/thankyou.aspx?f amilyId=285eeffd-d86c-48c3-ab93-3abd5ee7f1ce&displ ayLang=en

Yes, actually. The cat does "got my tongue."

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> Microsoft has made a 'commitment to make its patents that are required to implement the
> specification available without charge.'

Ok

> While JPEG 2000 exists, HD Photo has several advantages (not the least of which is a lot less CPU power is needed).

Has anybody checked that the more efficient algorithms are among those in the patents to be released? What if they're hiding a patentable, very efficient decompression version, which they'll "discover" and patent, after this becomes the standard?

Remeber FAT

[EmbeddedJanitor]

The linked document is not from MS directly and is not binding on MS. No doubt all the small print with the hooks is in the actual legal docs.

MS has a track record of submitting its specs/patents to standards bodies and then trying to gouge people later. Look at FAT and SmartMedia for instance.

Re:It's A Trap. EULA to view the specs

[brainnolo]

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. Since when Apple has a proprietary photo format? And about Adobe, if you are referring to DNG, the format is really open and there are already many third party implementations in the wild. Actually it would be extremely positive for the photographers and software developers if all camera manufacturers switched to DNG.

Re:It's A Trap. EULA to view the specs

[ColdWetDog]

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.

Sorry, game over. The TIFF format won a while back. (.psd is in second). There is no real reason to change this for the foreseeable future. These are manipulation and storage formats, have been so for the past decade and do what they need to do.

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.

Wrong battle. While there are multiple and incompatible RAW formats, this is not at all the focus or market for the Microsoft HD format. I am sure that MS would like camera makers to replace the standard in camera jpeg with the MS format but I rather doubt that this will happen. They've spent too much time and energy tweaking the in camera jpeg engines to want to do wholesale changes for some ethereal benefit and the jpeg format is well nigh universal. Whatever minimal improvement the MS format will create, it has much too much of an uphill battle to go anywhere.

Re:Oh God! Of course it's a big deal.

[dedazo]

M$ is sure to make this one of those awefull non-standards like ACPI

Standard enough for Linux and BSD to implement and use? Where's your standard?

Want to bet their idea of a no charge "implementation" is a NDA protected SDK?

Want to bet ISO and JPEG (the group) would not even give it the once over if that was the case?

They will then force it [... Windoze... M$... doom... etc]

Right, just like they did with the bitmap and DIB format. Oh, but you're cynical. I forget.

If jpeg 2000 is not good enough, there's PNG.

So you simply don't understand what each format is intended for or what their issues and strengths are. It's just the usual "that incompatible thing over there is good enough even if it's not, as long as it's not M$" attitude.

JPEG2000 is patent-encumbered, unfortunately. JPEG obtained "assurances" that no one would nail them later, but if I have to choose between the JPEG and Microsoft to defend me against submarine patents, my money is on Microsoft. Alternatively, you can always imagine that the patent system has disappeared and hope for the best.

they would simply surrender their patents

You know, I'm sure they'll do that - as soon as everybody else does. Patents are an unfortunate mexican standoff, and you can hardly blame Microsoft for the state of things. Oh wait, you can. You also hilariously blame them for the dotcom bubble burst, so I guess anything is possible.

they don't like free formats

Are you still going on about that? God, even the article says it was a mistake, which was corrected.

Let's just hope this bad idea dies with Vista.

Ah, your cute journal entry. BTW, I'm still waiting to hear how it is possible for all those Vista licenses you claimed Microsoft was "stuffing the channel" with miraculously managed to get themselves connected to teh interwebs?

The "evil" in MS's actions:

[Gr8Apes]

Well, the inability to use it in GPL v2/3 code would be the evil part that the OP was referring to. There you go.

Re:It's A Trap. EULA to view the specs

[Millenniumman]

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. What is Apple's?

Perhaps Microsoft is triny to appear NOT EVIL??

[whatme]

For all the Microsoft bashing that goes on, this may be a piece of creative marketing on Microsoft's end. Consider the management looking at this piece of Intellectual Property (IP).

Tech Guy 1: "We've got this great piece of IP with the encoder, how do we capitalize on it?"

Manager 1: "Sorry, but our market research shows that no-one will pay for it"

Manager 2: "So we've spent $$ developing this and we're going to shelve it??"

Marketer 1: "Let's give it away, but force everyone to call it *.MSjpgHD for the file extension."

Marketer 2: "Awsome. Just think of all the free advertising value."

Microsoft gains some value from the IP by giving it away. It seems the concensus here that if they try and charge for it, no-one will accept it and it will be a net loss. MS isn't (always) stupid. Perhaps they are thinking they can milk it for some free "NOT EVIL" publicity. Giving something back to the community and all so to speak.

Re:Hey Genius

[Applekid]

Don't you mean "Microsoft product, specification, service or technology"

Learn what commas do.

Re:It's A Trap. EULA to view the specs

[RegularFry]

You can view the HDPhoto spec under the DPK EULA, which has much more liberal terms.

Re:floating point colour

[The Raven]

Most image formats treat color as a series of discrete values. For example, I could have a black dot (0 red, 0 green, 0 blue), or a white dot (255 red, 255 green, 255 blue, the highest possible values), or any color in between. Well... 'any' color is kind of misleading. The numbers have to go up by a full step each time. While it can be difficult, to the discerning eye you can see the 'line' between a wash of (0,0,0) color and a wash of (1,0,1) color. The color 'jumps', and for certain types of images the jump can be noticeable and ugly. Plus, there is the additional problem of how you represent REALLY bright colors... for example, you can have a white wall, and then next to it the SUN... the sun a hundreds or thousands of times as bright as the wall, but they're both labeled the same... this makes it hard to really show them accurately.

Floating point color means that instead of having a fixed range of color values (0 to 255, or 0 to 65535, or 0 to 16.7 million), you open it up to allow nearly any value, by allowing decimals.

0.1, 15.73332, 2.31 * 10e13 (exponential notation, equivalent to 23100000000000). Floating point values aren't more precise than integers, but they have a wider range. This lets computers represent the range of brightnesses in a sunset shot (bright sun, nearly dark foreground) in a way that allows us to see a lot more detail, and give us far more flexibility in how to expose and display the image.

Licensing details on wikipedia

[jab]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_Photo#Licensing

At the very least, the standards body should require HD Photo
to fall under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise. I'm also
not thrilled about the anti-GPL clause in the devkit; it will cause
interoperability problems with Open Source or Free Software and ISO
should get that clause removed before approving.

Re:Licensing details on wikipedia

[Kalriath]

I'm also not thrilled about the anti-GPL clause in the devkit; it will cause interoperability problems with Open Source or Free Software and ISO should get that clause removed before approving. Why should they? FSF wont ever make concessions to allow you to link GPL code in with anything else that isn't some sort of "GPL-compatible" license, why should Microsoft? If anyone cares they can just implement it as a BSD licensed library. You're making a mountain out of a molehill.

Can't make "Public Domain"

[AlpineR]

When I was choosing a license for my open source software projects, I looked into releasing into the public domain. I didn't care if it got put into closed source projects, commercial or otherwise. I just wanted to release it to the world for all to use.

As far as I could research, you can't actually declare a copyrightable work to be in public domain. It becomes public domain when the copyright term expires (in a century or so at the earliest) or if it's exempt from copyright as a product of the federal government. I thought about making up my own license: "This is free to use and copy for any purpose whatsoever." But I couldn't find a precedent and I am not a lawyer. So I went with the closest thing I could find, BSD.

So I don't know if it's legally possible for Microsoft to relinquish their patent.

Re:Can't make "Public Domain"

[cyclop]

You should have gone with the Do The Fuck You Want Public License: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL

(No, it's not a joke. AFAIK, some WindowMaker icons were released under the WTFPL)

Re:Can't make "Public Domain"

[lilomar]

As far as I could research, you can't actually declare a copyrightable work to be in public domain. Yes you can, see my sig.

It's really that easy.

Re:Can't make "Public Domain"

[lilomar]

Really? It seems kind of strange to have no Public Domain. Who do they consider to be the copyright holder of works where the author isn't known and is long gone? Like cave paintings or ancient sculpture?

Re:Can't make "Public Domain"

[ElecCham]

That depends on what country you're in. In the United States, it's perfectly doable. In Germany, however, you're not allowed to sign away copyright. I did some research to this regarding code contributions to Qt; their dual-licensing scheme means that it's insufficient for you to license the code to them. They actually need to own the code.

dynamic range

[Bassman59]

It's great that the dynamic range is being extended beyond eight bits per channel. That's good news for high-quality print processes, etc.

If only my monitor and graphics card could handle, say, a 16-bit greyscale, so I could do a proper preview.

Re:dynamic range

[dangitman]

Hmmm... monitors generally have a higher gamut than printed paper, don't they? Your comment seems a little backwards.

Re:dynamic range

[Neuticle]

Have you ever looked at a picture on a monitor compared to a (quality) photo print of it?
If you can't tell the difference, it's time to see the ophthalmologist, you may be colour-blind
Print has monitors beat on DPI and colour, hands down.

Have you ever seen a monitor do a fluorescent colour realistically? No. Start to look a little more critically and you'll notice that there is still a LOT of room to improve with screen tech. OLED is one just over the horizon tech that is supposed to blow LCDs away with better colour. It's just starting to show up in small sizes like phones screens and such.

*The new whiz-bang Dell monitors just recently got to 92% of the NTSC colour gamut, and that was a BIG step up from the average 70% for most consumer flat panels. Further, the NTSC colour gamut is still just a limited set of what the eye can actually see.

Re:dynamic range

[dangitman]

Have you ever looked at a picture on a monitor compared to a (quality) photo print of it?

Seeing as I've been a professional photographer for 15 years, I think that I'm rather familiar with that. A good monitor has a wider gamut than a print. A photographic print is better than a CMYK print, but a monitor can reproduce colors that a print cannot. Prints are very flat compared to a projected slide or image on a good monitor.

Projected slides, or looking directly at a slide or negative on a lightbox can outdo a monitor, but a print cannot. Why do you think you get those gamut warnings in Photoshop?

If you can't tell the difference, it's time to see the ophthalmologist, you may be colour-blind

Really? I was thinking you may be suffering from the same issue, if you can't see that a reflective print has a lower dynamic range than a monitor or projected slide.

Print has monitors beat on DPI and colour, hands down.

I don't see what DPI has to do with this discussion, since nobody mentioned it - we were talking about dynamic range.

Have you ever seen a monitor do a fluorescent colour realistically?

Yes, compared to a photo print or CMYK print, monitors do a much better job. If you're talking about printing with special flourescent inks as spot colors, that's a whole different kettle of fish. There's no way of previewing that correctly, other than doing proofs with the special ink. A monitor gets much closer than a printed proof can.

The new whiz-bang Dell monitors just recently got to 92% of the NTSC colour gamut, and that was a BIG step up from the average 70% for most consumer flat panels

I think you're talking out of your ass, because just about any monitor can beat the NTSC gamut.

First generation

[gilesjuk]

Im sure the first version will be free, but they will then start charging etc..

Microsoft cares only about money and anything they can do to bring more is good for them.

They want their tech in digital cameras and devices to get the licence fees from such devices.

Re:"Nothing for you to see here; please move along

[Ruliz Galaxor]

Ahh, that reminds me again of the superb compression program I wrote a while ago: LZip (Lossy Zip). The only problem is that I LZipped the source code and removed all binaries.

WiMP

[boardboyda]

Windows new HD photo format is released as WiMP!

Re:FP

[BlenderFX]

How nice of them, an exe file.

Re:JPEG 2000

[fireboy1919]

JP2000 is alive and well in GIS raster imagery. Gigantic maps need formats that look good and are resolution independent.

Re:"Nothing for you to see here; please move along

[JazzLad]

And then, by posting, de-modded him.

It's JPEG 2000 all over again, but worse

[Shimmer]

Ken Rockwell has a very good article about this.

Re:It's A Trap. EULA to view the specs

[Bert64]

It doesnt matter how inferior the microsoft format is, they will pressure/bribe companies into supporting it and slowly but surely people will start using it anyway...
That's why we need to campaign against it now before it gets too strong, or ensure that it truly is an open standard that anyone can implement freely.

MNG is too comples for Firefox

[Nahor]

Further reading seems to indicate that Mozilla's developers had MNG support, but yanked it in favor of APNG support.

There is a huge bug in bugzilla about MNG. MNG was basically pulled because it was deemed too complex, increasing Firefox size too much for not enough worth.

APNG was preferred because it is simpler too implement (or integrates better with the existing PNG decoder or something like that) and doesn't increase Firefox's size as much.

Re:MNG is too comples for Firefox

[MrNaz]

Lies! I refuse to believe that there has ever been talk in the Firefox dev team about memory size!

Re:MNG is too comples for Firefox

[Nahor]

Lies! I refuse to believe that there has ever been talk in the Firefox dev team about memory size!

Believe what you want

Re:MNG is too comples for Firefox

[MrNaz]

Look up. See that thing stuck to the ceiling? It's a joke.

Re:Yes, actually. The cat does "got my tongue."

[dangitman]

Who the f*** decided that sentences on the Internet shall no longer be formatted with two spaces after a period?!

I'm not sure if your .sig is serious or not, but the "two spaces after a sentence" convention died out with typewriters, and wasn't even a good idea in those days. It is to be avoided in all electronic typesetting. I hate it when people put those extra spaces in. You want extra space between sentences? Then change the layout rules in your software.

Re:"Nothing for you to see here; please move along

[snoyberg]

I think you might be mistaking irony for despair. Whatever Microsoft does Microsoft does for Microsoft; and that means what will make them money. Why would they have gone to the bother of making a (very good, i hear) new image file format... for our benefit? I don't think so....

This can only end badly.

Look, I dislike Microsoft just as much as anyone else, but that comment is just ill informed. Just because M$ might stand to make money off a deal does not mean it will "end badly." In the vast majority of industries, consumers gain when companies do something just to make money. Just because M$ in the past has found ones of making money that have been harmful to us doesn't mean it will be the case this time.

Re:Will be obsolete

[Grishnakh]

To capture a scene that the human eye can ascertain, you need a dynamic range of 100,000

That's probably just for humans with trichromatic vision. Women with tetrachromatic vision would probably need even more.

Re:"Nothing for you to see here; please move along

[Lehk228]

linux has come with rm as long as i can remember

Re:"Nothing for you to see here; please move along

[WilliamSChips]

The most confusing part of that post: Somebody is using "M$" in a defense of Microsoft!

No, he has a very bad article on this.

[Glytch]

Ken Rockwell is the photography world's equivalent of John Dvorak. He's in it for the page hits, ad dollars, name dropping, and ego boost. He's also on a private little crusade against using any format other than JPEG for image capture. He's just a kook, but a kook that too many unwary amateurs might take seriously.

In that utterly content-free article you linked to, he goes on a diatribe about format wars that have absolutely nothing to do with photography (AM stereo in the 70's doesn't have much to do with photos formats, Ken), and when he finally comes to the 1/6th of the article in which he actually talks about HD Photo, he talks about it strictly as a display format, and not as the capture plus editing plus display format that it's meant to be.

Photographers with DSLRs who don't use raw (or at the least, whatever their camera's raw+jpeg mode is) are not serious about their art. Using only JPEG as a capture format is exactly like destroying your film negatives after you get your prints.

Re:No, he has a very bad article on this.

[Shimmer]

I disagree with you about RAW in particular and Ken Rockwell in general. He is a bit of a windbag, but much of what he says is spot-on artistically. Of course technophiles are going to disagree with him, because he goes out of his way to make fun of them. But his position is valid (if exaggerated) - a camera is just a tool, and it doesn't make the picture for you any more than a hammer builds a house for you.

FWIW, I'm a serious amateur photographer and I use JPEG format. RAW isn't worth the hassle for me.

I don't know much about HD Photo, but I do think that Rockwell is right philosophically - an incremental improvement that no one needs (yes, like AM Stereo) will tend to fail.

Re:No, he has a very bad article on this.

[Glytch]

HD Photo is not an "incremental improvement"! JPEG is fine for display, but is worthless as a high end capture and editing format. 3 channels, 8 bits per channel in a fixed colourspace and profile, with no option for lossless compression? That's just begging for artifacts, posterization problems, and combing in the histogram when editing.

Digital camera sensors are capable of much more depth and dynamic range than JPEG can deliver. I spend a lot of time and effort shooting, and believe in squeezing every bit of quality and detail I can get from my photos. Raw is imperfect, but does the job for now. HD Photo looks to save me a lot of headaches in the future, if the patent issues can be sorted out and a legal LGPL, GPL or BSD implementation can be written.

Re:No, he has a very bad article on this.

[Shimmer]

Technically, you may be right. There are some very good photographers out there who need this level of sophistication. However, I think that many technophiles think they need this when they don't. (I looked at your photos, and frankly I suspect this category may include you.)

98% of the people who use Photoshop don't need this. For the small number who do, RAW works, right? I can't see camera makers investing the effort into a standard RAW-like format for such a small audience, since they can't make any additional money from doing so. That's why I suspect HD Photo won't catch on.

Re:No, he has a very bad article on this.

[12357bd]

I am also an amateur photograph, but I am still avoiding being digital. I would like to ask you, is current cameras definition really comparable to chemical films?

Re:No, he has a very bad article on this.

[Glytch]

That's the eternal debate, isn't it? :)

In terms of resolution and low noise at high ISO settings, DSLR sensors beat film years ago. As for dynamic range, they're usually in between slide and negative film. It's no big deal in real life situations, one just has to be a little more careful to get the exposure right and not blow out the highlights, just as with slides. The histogram (the greatest idea since the light meter!) helps.

Compact digital sensors are another story entirely. The short version is, if it's an SLR, the sensor will be excellent. If it's not an SLR, try before you buy so you know what you're getting into.

Film still has a few advantages. If one shoots medium or large format as an amateur, good quality film is far cheaper than a digital back. Digital sucks for hours-long exposures due to battery issues, unless you've got the camera plugged into an AC adaptor. Also, any t-grain black and white film easily matches the resolution and far exceeds the dynamic range of any digital sensor. (I think B&W film is going to survive longer than negative film. Developing and printing B&W film is an art in itself.)

As for my previous rants on raw formats, I'm just baffled that anyone would spends thousands of dollars on bodies and lenses just to use their equipment like a $200 point-and-shoot. It's like watching someone buy a stratocaster and then hanging it on their living room wall.

Re:No, he has a very bad article on this.

[12357bd]

Thanks! It seems I am gonna stay analogic for a while, (I like to do big bw pictures). :)

About RAW vs JPEG, as a programmer i am on your side, raw is THE DATA, jpeg is just a lossy compression version.

Re:"Nothing for you to see here; please move along

[Anonymous Coward]

I know nothing about the spec, but maybe it is something like it opens three times faster with DirectX than it does with compiles for Mac and Linux? Getting people to put something like that as a default format for cameras to use would give MS a competitive advantage but still be something that others could use free.

Re:Here we go again . . .

[jhylkema]

Shit . . . the wingnut mods are out of the asylum again. How is this a troll? It's the truth! The Bush-dominated DOJ folded the royal flush it was holding against His Billness!

Re:Yes, actually. The cat does "got my tongue."

[MP3Chuck]

"Who the f*** decided that sentences on the Internet shall no longer be formatted with two spaces after a period?!"

Put as many spaces as you want. They're ignored unless they're either 1) formatted as &nbsp; or 2) wrapped in a <pre> element.

Absense of good JPEG2000 libraries

[xixax]

I recently evaluated a few wavelet formats for geo-data:

  - MrSID - Windows only binary libs, restrictive licensing
  - ECW - Great performance, but the open source license prevents you from doing anything useful
  - JPG200 - I looked at Jasper and one other li8brary, both were slower and more flakey than ECW

Viz, ECW would have romped it in if the license was even a little more enlightened.

JPG2000 libs will need to at least match other wavelet formats to get anywhere, we already have vendors supplying data in ECW, format translations are a PITAm, especially if you lose performance.

Xix.

They yanked MNG because they had no MNG devs

[anss123]

Nothing to it really. MNG is a huge complicated spec, APNG is simpler. They can afford the dev effort of implementing APNG, but not the dev effort of maintaining the previously working but orphaned MNG impl.

Comparison with JPEG 2000 codecs

[brianwells]

A detailed comparison of Microsoft's HD Photo with various JPEG 2000 codecs can be found here: http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/w mp_codecs_comparison_en.html.

Interestingly, it indicates that HD Photo's quality is not particularly better than JPEG 2000 with some implementations of JPEG 2000 significantly outperforming HD Photo.

Re:It's A Trap. EULA to view the specs

[zygote]

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.

As a professional photojournalist, I disagree. Most of us -- well, those of us who when through the film to digital transition -- are very sensitive to changes in formats. Often the consequences of using a proprietary format are recognized, but there is little you can do about it. It is getting better as more imaging software supports various flavors of Camera RAW, for example. But, I'm still wondering how to get photos from a Super Bowl shot with a Nikon NC2000 off the Syquest disks we stored them on...SCSI reader, too.

In the meantime, I still shoot photos of my little boy & girl on film with the assumption that shining light through the negative will work 40 years from now to create a print/scan/holograph ...

Which fucker modded me troll?

[theolein]

From further down:
"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)

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. ...You may not (i) duplicate any part of these Materials
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."

So, uhm yeah, I was right.

Mod parent up!

[Indigo]

+1 Says it all

Good for microsoft

[dirtyhippie]

For the record, JPEG2000 != JPEG. Just wanted to make sure everyone knew that, because from some of the comments it seems clear that many people don't.

But yeah, good for microsoft. Yeah, I said it. On slashdot, no less, and I mean it.

The trouble is that jpeg2000 is a patent minefield, and no one has made any promise not to sue or charge fees on it. Which is why, despite being dramatically better technically, we are stuck with blocky JPEGs. Microsoft's proposal is better than jpeg2000, because the IP is all in one place, and they are interested in giving it away for free (or so it seems).

So, to sum up, technically HD Photo is about the same as JPEG2000, both of which beat JPEG.
But licensing wise, JPEG > HD Photo > JPEG2000

So, this is a death knell for JPEG2000, which is a good thing. Of course, it'd be even better if there was a good patent-free solution for a next generation format, but I suspect just about everyone will continue using JPEG anyway.

Re:"Nothing for you to see here; please move along

[IpalindromeI]

I'm a bit of an anti-capitalist...

I'm saying it's highly unlikely Microsoft is doing this out of the good of their heart.

Maybe you're anti-capitalist because you don't understand how capitalism works. Of course they aren't doing out of the kindness of their heart. The point of capitalism is that the self-interest of each party works to the eventual benefit of the other, because they each have something the other wants. In this case, Microsoft has a potentially useful file format. Consumers have money. Microsoft wants money. Whether consumers want this new file format enough to make the trade is the rub.

Re:"Nothing for you to see here; please move along

[snoyberg]

As I said, I hate M$. But bashing them for trying to make money is ridiculous; they are a corporation. And just because corporation makes money doesn't necessarily mean we're suffering.

But M$ still sucks.

SenderID

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Microsoft has made a 'commitment to make its patents that are required to implement the specification available without charge.'

... just like Microsoft did with Sender ID.

Re:Microsoft, Extortion de luxe

[Nicolay77]

Icaza is not a poor misguided fool.

His actions are too precise and strategic for that to be the case. I actually believe he is in Microsoft payroll.

See my previous comment on this issue:

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=228 375&cid=18509363

Re:Yes, actually. The cat does "got my tongue."

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Yes, but the original reason, to give the eye aid in determining breaks in sentences, still applies.

stupid

[oohshiny]

Designing a new compression format is trivial at this point: the math is well understood, as are the tradeoffs involved. The issue is always patents and standardization.

JPEG2000 has pretty much all the properties you'd want in a next generation digital imaging format, and it's already widely used in the movie industry. There are also hardware compression cores for JPEG2000.

So, I don't see any reason whatsoever to adopt the Microsoft format over JPEG2000.

unacceptable

[oohshiny]

It's genuinely a good format.

Neither you nor Microsoft are qualified to determine that since you have no idea what requirements other people in industry may have.

That's why we have standards bodies, and they need to beat away on a standard before it finally gets accepted.

I just hope it doesn't get bogged down in politics and legal wrangling.

I hope it does: Microsoft's approach of creating a spec and then telling people "take it as a standard" is intrinsically unacceptable. Even if, against all odds, they were to produce a good standard, it should get rejected. Microsoft needs to learn to play by industry rules, not attempt to set them.

multipage documents?

[oohshiny]

because you can do almost everything that TIFF can do, but with less complexity

Multipage documents?

Re:Will be obsolete

[Achromus]

HD photo's specification says that it can contain n-channel images. A person could make a 4 channel image if they wanted.

Re:Will be obsolete

[Grishnakh]

Hmm.. that's interesting. So if we genetically engineer humans to have 8 different cones (including cones for infrared and ultraviolet), HD Photo can capture appropriate images for them?

Genetic engineering is falling way behind!

Re:"Nothing for you to see here; please move along

[try_anything]

This is all about power and market share, with only a small element of competition. Here's why:

The only place this image file format will make any difference is in small battery-powered devices such as cameras and cell phones. Camera companies will use it to save battery power. Consumers will buy the cameras because they want lighter cameras or longer battery life. They will plug the cameras into their computers and expect them to work. That means every non-Windows desktop system has to support the image format or appear deficient. This gives Microsoft power over everybody who makes software for desktop systems. Microsoft will turn that power into money.

"What's wrong with this?" you might ask. What's wrong with it is that it doesn't work for anybody else: nobody else has the power to make this happen without Microsoft's permission, no matter how valuable their idea is. Nobody is going to sell cameras that aren't guaranteed to work with all reasonably recent Windows computers. That means Microsoft has veto power on this kind of innovation and can use that power to grab a percentage of every good idea like this one.

Suppose Joe Blow in Albuquerque comes up with a brilliant idea for a flash drive filesystem. It can't be sold if it doesn't run under Windows. That means he has to take his invention to Microsoft, sign over whatever percentage they demand (since it's worth nothing at all without their approval,) and let them market it as a great Microsoft innovation. Microsoft doesn't produce anything in this scenario. They make money purely through their power to kill innovation.

Re:Will be obsolete

[Achromus]

Using additional channels to capture that spectrum information would be cool. Additional channels could also be used in a camera that can capture a depth map. The technology to photograph depth already exists - SwissRanger makes that stuff - but it hasn't become widespread yet.

Who is burned by hot milk...

[jotaeleemeese]

.... is suspicious even of ice cream.

Or something like that goes a Mexican saying.

MS threatens patent litigation against Linux and then comes with a new graphics format that will be "open" to all.

Well, sorry, but the mixed messages are splitting my brain, so I err on the side of paranoiac caution.

Because it is a fucking standard.

[jotaeleemeese]

Not a library or piece of code.

An standard is not such a thing if you attach strings.

Re:Because it is a fucking standard.

[Kalriath]

Since when has the devkit been a fucking standard (as you put it).

The devkit is reference code. Your argument is complete bullshit.

That's akin to saying that Samba is GPL because it's reference code is GPL. This is not the case, because (using your own argument against you) "it's a fucking standard, not a library or piece of code"