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Microsoft's HD Photo to Become JPEG Standard?
Mortimer.CA writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft has submitted their HD Photo to the JPEG committee: 'Microsoft's ongoing attempt to establish its own photo format as a JPEG alternative (and potential successor) took another step forward today when the JPEG standards group agreed to consider HD Photo (originally named Windows Media Photo) as a standard. If successful, the new file standard will be known as JPEG XR.' Microsoft has made a 'commitment to make its patents that are required to implement the specification available without charge.' While JPEG 2000 exists, HD Photo has several advantages (not the least of which is a lot less CPU power is needed). Is this a big of an issue as ODF/OOXML?"
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:
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?
If the specification is as free as ASCII, to use one example, then there is nothing wrong in adopting that as a standard.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"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!
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).
Your digital camera puts out 500kb native resolution files?
It looks fine on my lynx.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
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.
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.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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.
It just so happens I am planning an HD Image product, service or technology and the spec is totally hostile to everyone BUT microsoft. (no surprise there)
...You may not (i) duplicate any part of these Materials
1. 1. You may review these Materials only (a) as a reference to assist You in planning and designing Your product, service or technology ("Product") to interface with a Microsoft product, specification, service or technology
Mac/Linux/BSD? Nope. So, that appears to rule out web-based stuff. Fortunately, I'm only working on Windows, so I'll read on.
Okay I won't. But how does my engineering group work with the spec if I can't duplicate it?
any Feedback you voluntarily provide may be used in Microsoft Products
Okay, I won't provide any feedback. It was once believed that developers were Microsoft's focus. Apparently not anymore.
Without going into specifics because the EULA prevents it, there are proprietary elements hidden inside this spec.
It's clear they are *very* late to the pro-photo fight that is on now between Apple and Adobe. Each of those companies has a proprietary "pro photo" format.
Sadly most pro photographers won't think about the consequences of adopting proprietary formats until it is too late. For example, some legacy proprietary raw images as provided by the camera manufacturers are not backward compatible. I've read it in the mailing lists already.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Gentoo Sucks
You won't get to CMYK or 32 bits per channel from a source image and if you're sane then you won't ever store this image (unless you're exporting for a print fun), you'll store the sequence of transforms on the original image. Destructive editing is a quaint idea, but not a good one.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If there are restrictions, Microsoft's HD photo will go the way of the GIF format.
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
I blame the stupid version name.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
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.
More Twoson than Cupertino
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
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
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.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Specs, licence and example code are here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/thankyou.aspx?f amilyId=285eeffd-d86c-48c3-ab93-3abd5ee7f1ce&displ ayLang=en
Reality is the ultimate Rorschach.
> 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?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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...
Reality is the ultimate Rorschach.
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.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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.
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.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
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.
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.
.gifs, I promise you that, unless something better comes along between now and the time it takes for IE6 to die.
They will replace
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
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.
It's really that easy.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
How nice of them, an exe file.
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.
Thank God for evolution.
Lies! I refuse to believe that there has ever been talk in the Firefox dev team about memory size!
I hate printers.
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.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
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.
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.
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.
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.