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Microsoft Move to be the End of JPEG?
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Thu Mar 08, 2007 08:13 PM
from the just-a-little-bit-better dept.
from the just-a-little-bit-better dept.
jcatcw writes "Microsoft Corp. will submit a new photo format to an international standards organization. The format, HD Photo (formerly known as Windows Media Photo), can accommodate lossless and lossy compression. Microsoft claims that adjustments can be made to color balance and exposure settings that won't discard or truncate data that occurs with other bit-map formats."
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Nup, No, Nada. (Score:5, Informative)
This is going to enjoy the same sort of limited uptake as jpeg2000 vs jpg, mp4/wma/ogg vs mp3, png vs gif, etc.
Few other things to note:
1) The 'HD' doesn't stand for High Definition, it's just there to get the association with HD TV in consumers minds. *rolls eyes*
2) This technology is patented to the hilt & the licensing terms for the HD Photo Device Porting Kit 1.0 licensing terms [wikipedia.org] specifically exclude copyleft (GPL style) licenses.
PNG with bzip2 compression? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:PNG with bzip2 compression? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:PNG with bzip2 compression? (Score:4, Informative)
In 2001 I considered using bzlib to compress some data files in the Brazilian electronic voting system and, since we had to support older, 386-class hardware with little memory, we went the gzip route.
Later some Windows fanboy decided they should use
Consider we are not talking only desktop PCs, but low-end embedded and photographic equipment.
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Re:PNG with bzip2 compression? (Score:4, Interesting)
TIFF had a problem like that in it's early days when the name was said to stand for "Thousands of Incompatible File Formats". The same things happens today when I try to open a
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Re:PNG with bzip2 compression? (Score:4, Interesting)
On the down side, just because it says
On the plus side, it means we're still using .avi, years later -- because it's not tied to any specific codecs that will probably become obsolete over time.
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Wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
"PNG restarts the compression on each row"
That is absolutely not true, and would be madness if it were. From the specification [w3.org], section 4.5.5:
The rest of your post is suspect now, of course.Parent
Re:PNG with bzip2 compression? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget that it's no longer just space/time tradeoffs. There's also the network bandwidth tradeoff. And network bandwidth is not on the same kind of curve as CPU's or storage at least for WANs.
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RAW? (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know where you're getting that statement from. Everybody dissatisfied with JPG - which I can only imagine stems from the fact that it is lossy compression - is either using:
PNG - because it's common, free to use, etc. etc.
EXR - because it'll allow you to store whatever the hell you want
GIF - because it's ubiquitious and is free to use nowadays (not that too many people cared a few years ago)
'RAW' isn't used by anybody. 'RAW' does not exist. 'RAW' is a collective name for a shitload of formats by a smaller shitload of digital camera companies. And it is never "RAW".. it is never raw data.. it's compressed, stored integratedly or separately, encrypted or not (SONY, among other) and contains a bunch of camera data. The closest thing to a "RAW" format is, say, PFM (portable/pixel float map) or any other format that just stores every color(group) as a bunch of bytes in a long chunk with minimal to zero header/footer information whatsoever that you can only open if you know things like bitdepth and dimension. The closest thing to a unified 'RAW' format for cameras is Adobe's DNG (Digital Negative) - and that's finding slow (no?) adoption as it is. And the closest thing to a unified non-'RAW' format for cameras that isn't lossy compressed is TIFF. None of which you can toss on a website and make viewable in any of the major browsers without plugin installation (if even available!)
That said, I agree with all your other points, especially point 1. Microsoft should be kicked even when down for jumping on the HD bandwagon with a product (or format) that has nothing whatsoever to do with HD.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
RAW versus "raw", and other major errors... (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know where you're getting that statement from. Everybody dissatisfied with JPG - which I can only imagine stems from the fact that it is lossy compression - is either using: (PNG, GIF, EXR.)
You don't understand what "raw" images are used for. They're used PURELY in the acquisition phase. There isn't a (non-webcam/hideously-dumbed down) camera in the world that records to GIF, I don't know of a single camera on the market that records to PNG, and EXR is a very specialized format used mostly in "film" (ie movie production.) No still digital cameras on the market record to it.
'RAW' isn't used by anybody. 'RAW' does not exist. 'RAW' is a collective name for a shitload of formats by a smaller shitload of digital camera companies.
No, it's not. RAW = Canon's "raw" image format. "Raw" image formats are produced by many higher-end digital cameras. I'm sorry you don't understand the distinction between RAW and raw, but it does make it painfully obvious this isn't your area of expertise. It is mine: I've shot RAW images on my Canon dSLR for fun and profit for several years now. I shoot exclusively in RAW format because of the extra bit depth which makes adjustments much more 'transparent' (a level adjustment won't cause as much problems wit 10-12 bit data as it will with 8 bit, and you also have no compression artifacts.) I archive everything in the original Canon RAW format.
Your characterization that "raw" formats are used by a "shitload of smaller digital camera companies" is also completely wrong. Canon's RAW and Nikons's NEF are by far the largest, most commonly used "raw" formats. Phase1 is probably up there with their digital camera backs. I'm now guessing, but Fuji is probably next (Fuji dSLRs were very popular a few years back, in part because the Fuji SuperCCD was superior to almost everything else on the market at the time), followed by Panasonic/Leica, followed by Pentax.
Many point-and-shoot consumer cameras these days are incapable of shooting in a RAW mode; it's left to the "prosumer" models by most manufacturers.
And it is never "RAW".. it is never raw data.. it's compressed, stored integratedly or separately, encrypted or not (SONY, among other) and contains a bunch of camera data.
It most certainly is raw image sensor data; that's the whole point. "Raw" camera formats all use LOSSLESS compression. Yes, all of them contain incredibly useful EXIF-like data in them. This is not, despite your rant, a negative to anyone I know. Few manufacturers encrypt the data; Nikon encrypts the white balance info on one or two models (which happen to be the several-thousand-dollar professional digital SLR bodies.)
In most cameras (certainly the Canons and Nikons), it is, in fact, "raw"; it represents the closest you can get to the original sensor data, with little or no processing (on Canon cameras, I believe they don't even do thermal noise subtraction prior to writing the RAW file; the file even contains the "dead" area of the sensor used for such compensation), and anywhere from 10 to 12 bits per channel precision. No white balance, brightness/contrast, gamma, or sharpening adjustments are applied before the data is recorded.
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Convincing but wrong, mod parent down (Score:4, Informative)
'RAW' isn't used by anybody. 'RAW' does not exist. 'RAW' is a collective name for a shitload of formats by a smaller shitload of digital camera companies.
No, it's not. RAW = Canon's "raw" image format. "Raw" image formats are produced by many higher-end digital cameras. I'm sorry you don't understand the distinction between RAW and raw, but it does make it painfully obvious this isn't your area of expertise. It is mine: I've shot RAW images on my Canon dSLR for fun and profit for several years now. I shoot exclusively in RAW format because of the extra bit depth which makes adjustments much more 'transparent' (a level adjustment won't cause as much problems wit 10-12 bit data as it will with 8 bit, and you also have no compression artifacts.) I archive everything in the original Canon RAW format.
Since you claim expertise in this area and make some arguments that are, on the surface, convincing I feel it is important to point out mistakes in your arguments. Mistakes that even a relatively raw beginner such as myself are aware of. It appears that you have a very high level understanding of RAW, but to extend this into an understanding of the internals is a dangerous thing to do on Slashdot. First of all, since you speak of Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Pentax 'raw', I think you do understand that each of these formats are unique. The original poster is correct that some manufacturers (e.g. Sony) actually encrypt some of the data in their RAW format so that (for instance) the white balance can only be extracted using proprietary software. It may not be "a Sh!7l0ad of smaller manufacturers" from your point of view, but since I've seen relatively inexpensive Sony, Canon, Pentax and (the dearly departed) Minolta cameras spit out what their marketing material claims is "raw". The bottom line is that RAW is like tiff, only worse in that the data, data representation (byte order...), encoder and container may change from manufacturer to manufacturer. The only thing Canon RAW and Sony RAW are certain to have in common is that their marketing material, instruction book and camera's menu uses the three letters 'R', 'A', and 'W' to represent the name of the format (or in some cases 'r', 'a', 'w'. For a close look at the internals of many raw formats, I suggest you look at the source code to Dcraw. A few other mistakes, even really cheap webcams don't encode to gif (I don't know where that comment came from but they don't, the closed driver software takes the "raw" CMOS/CCD data and encodes it to GIF without letting the user see the raw data. If you're into astrophotography or have used a webcam on an opensource operating system, you'll understand more. Also, the raw file may be the closest consumers can come to the CCD's internal format, but by no means does is it identical to the RAW CCD data as it comes out of the CCD's analog light buckets (or CMOS gates) into the A/D. [cybercom.net]
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Re:Nup, No, Nada. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, in the context of digital photography (which I assume is what you're talking about here, though JPEG is of course not limited to that) "everyone" uses TIFF. Just try to do freelance for a news agency and watch how quickly they ask you for TIFF files, which only the high-end cameras can generate.
I suppose some of the smaller shops or newspapers and whatnot do use RAW, but for Reuters et.al if it's not TIFF you're not getting a paycheck. The same goes for the big stock photography companies and so on.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As for Microsoft's format, if it's not freely usable I don't see it taking off, and others have said it can't be used in GPL style projects, so it's clearly not for me.
It might be nice to have a format that compressed better than JPEG and had higher quality. Does JPEG-2000 render in web browsers?
D
GeoTIFF and BigTIFF formats (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Nup, No, Nada. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because there are various algorithms to do this, it would be downright foolish to send a RAW file to an agency. However, because there's no loss, converting the RAW to a TIFF is trivial, and there's no real reason not to shoot raw unless you don't plan on doing any post-processing. Also, RAW files tend to be smaller than TIFFs when shot on the camera.
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Re:Nup, No, Nada. (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to mention, I am highly skeptical of any attempt Microsoft claims to be making toward "standardization".
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GPL doesn't extend to user data (Score:3, Informative)
It applies to the code
Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data (Score:5, Informative)
itsatrap.
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Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:GPL doesn't extend to user data (Score:4, Informative)
Just FYI: It uses The Lesser GPL (LGPL); so that derivative work could restrict some users' freedom.
For the rest, your answer is fine. The suspicion of creative work automatically licenced under the code of the software is simply preposterous.
[Waiting for Microsoft to invent this new twist: A copy of your MS-Office documents are auto-sent-to Redmond and from then onwards, you will have to pay for the use of your own documents. Sorry, even for the fair use of your own documents.]
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL (Score:4, Informative)
Do you believe that your documentswill be subjected to MS's licensing terms when you save them in word? Of course not.
The GPL does not cover works created using GPLd tools. Learn the difference between code & content.
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Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL (Score:4, Informative)
Sure, the GPL FAQ explains this sort of thing:
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Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL (Score:5, Interesting)
I think, in part, you're confusing patents and copyright (for example, your discussion of MP3s), and I think, in part, you're trying to extrapolate the GPL as if it were copyright law.
So, let's step back a bit and try to untangle exactly what's going on. When you use a codec, you're using a piece of software. The codec itself is protected under copyright and possibly under patents. In any event, the actions the codec carries out are not in themselves creative. By this, I mean, the transformations are deterministic with an intended output; creativity could be said to be non-deterministic (ie, originality) with an intended output. Copyright only extends to works that are the result of a creative process. To that end, nothing a codec does could itself be copyrighted; if it could be, the codec itself would be the copyright owner, not the writer of the codec; of course, such a codec would seemingly fill the requirements of a partial AI, so I think the concerns of copyright would not exactly be high on the list of discussion.
Having said all that, we get into the issue of something like the MP3 codec. The concern with it, as related to the GPL, has more to do with the GPL having provisions about patents. Patents, as you likely know, apply to a process, not a specific implementation. This, of course, can be a huge issue with something like the GPL because a large point of the GPL is to allow for the redistribution of GPLed code. If only some people were allowed to legally redistribute the code, by paying patent royalties, then the "network" of involvement to improve GPLed code would be a lot less webbed and a lot more hierarchical (or, it'd be a lot more illegal). Because of this, the GPL requires that all distributed code that implements a patent include royalty-free redistribution covering that patent. Because the MP3 code is patented and there is no royalty-free redistribution allowed (no matter what is said about trying to include an exception for open source), gpled mp3 codecs are illegal, if for no other reason than the distributor of the gpled code is granting others a privilege he doesn't have.
Having said all that, there's nothing illegal about the mp3 format or inherently legal about mp3s themselves. But given the fact that you can't include an mp3 encoder or decoder with a totally GPL software distribution, MP3s have been frowned upon in the free/open software world. On top of that, of course, is the excessive piracy of music (and note, this is further proof that codecs don't change copyright; if they did, the codec maker would be the one suing over all the CD->MP3ed music, not the RIAA and its members) in MP3 format, as it was the first to make it readily possible to share music (commercial and otherwise) over the internet that has basically made MP3 synonymous with pirated music. The last thing many in the free software world want is to have the appearance that the GPL is all about "getting free (as in beer) stuff", even if it's through illegal means.
PS - Things like the gcc include an exception about the GPL not applying as a result of using gcc to compile a program precisely to avoid confusion over the issue; this is somewhat humorous as there are many places were a transformation application of one sort or another will copy small fragments of itself into the destination application, which you seem to recognize. The one overriding principle to always remember is that copyright applies first. The GPL is subordinate to the rules of copyright. So is every other, proprietary license. Now, if you wanted something with more fuzzy lines, one could discuss the linking of libraries. But, that's a whole other discussion.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Doesn't matter, the point is that anyone who's dissatisifed with JPG has allready found an alternative.
How many browsers do you know that render that format?
If you'd bothered to read the article before commenting, you would know that support in the camera is the support that matters.
Re:Nup, No, Nada. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not what you said. You said "Not going to end jpg - everyone dissatisfied with JPG is already using RAW." RAW is a camera format, not an output format. No one uses RAW as a replacement for jpeg except during image acquisition.
As for everyone already using alternatives, that may be so but that doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement. This may not be the answer but it's naive to think that the image formats we have now are all there will ever be.
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Re:Nup, No, Nada. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, they are using RAW data in the manner you outline, THEN they use TIFF for storing and transporting these images. TIFF is the industry de-facto. So, MS's little format might compress data better. It's not likely going to do much that TIFF can't be adapted to do.
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I wanted to hate DNG, but liked it instead. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know whether Adobe will pull it off, but I hope that it succeeds, or at least survives.
TIFF is a huge mess. Let's face it; it's a gigantic cockup. Anyone can write TIFF files, but they're nearly impossible to "read" in the sense that a user is going to expect: if I say that my application will "read TIFFs," they're going to expect that anything with a TIF extension is going to get read. And that's almost never the case; you can pack just too much stuff into the container.
(Although container formats have a certain elegance to them from a geek perspective, I'm not sure they're all they're cracked up to be. The number of times I've gotten a video file that I don't have a codec for, but have no way of knowing about until I try to open it, because the codec is concealed inside the MOV or AVI container, or similar problems with TIFs, is beyond number. There's some good sense in eliminating container formats, or at least tying the file extension and other metadata, not to the container, but to the codec inside.)
What I hope that Adobe can do, is give us some neutral ground that the various camera manufacturers can agree to use, so we can break away from the per-manufacturer RAW file formats, and the TIFF morass for interchange.
DNG already has support in probably the biggest single application of consequence, and that's Photoshop, and now they've got quite a few camera manufacturers on board, and the specification is open so there are FOSS implementations. Ed Hamrick's excellent VueScan scanning software produces them, too, and perhaps SilverFast will join the party sometime soon. If they can get the middle-market of consumer and prosumer cameras on board, then I think it will have a chance at achieving dominance from the imaging sensors on down the chain.
There's a lot to be said for it; anyone can implement it, but at the same time, there's some centralized control over the format, so that every Tom, Dick, and Harry can't build on their own crappy extension to the format and create the sort of Balkanization that's plagued TIFF. Hopefully, this will mean that people can implement it, and be confident that if they say that their app will 'read DNG,' that it will actually read all the various types of DNG files that users will throw at it.
If that's the only thing that DNG did, it would be a huge step forward.
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Meh (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
When MS adds "HD Photo" into the next OS (or patches it into Vista) & their line of Office programs as the default, what do you think is going to happen?
FTFA:
"Microsoft said HD Photo's lightweight algorithm causes less damage to photos during compression, with higher-quality images that are half the size of a JPEG."
PNG has well known limitations when it comes to photographs.
Size is a big one of them.
Won't End JPG (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, if I desaturate a photo I'm throwing away tons of color information. If that color information is still being written to the file, the file isn't as small as it could be.
Aside from that, PNG should have dethroned JPG long ago for the very simple reason that it contains an alpha channel -- but I still see plenty of JPG's.
PNG is no replacement for JPG (Score:5, Informative)
If you want a JPG replacement - a la OGG Vorbis over MP3 - try JPEG2000 or the lurawave stuff based on wavelets.
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What's the catch? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yawn (Score:5, Insightful)
If this is the same as the last time around, they've just taken tiff, duplicated a bunch of the baseline tags for no good reason (other than to make it incompatible), added their own codec (which they could have done to tiff very easily), removed a bunch of useful stuff from tiff, and called it their own image format. It's a real hack job.
It's just MS being the MS we've come to know and love so well -- making their own binary formats in the hopes of extending their monopoly.
Microsoft influence is waning (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"loosing"? (Score:4, Insightful)
You are obviously not a linguist. Linguists study just this sort of thing. It turns out that just these sort of 'widespread practices' go on all the time in languages. They do not destroy languages. They create new ones, and extend old ones.
Your fear of 'a cesspool of illiteracy' is completely unfounded. It will not happen. You can stop the grammar nazi posts now.
T
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If JPEG can't microsoft can't (Score:4, Interesting)
I think they should call it: (Score:5, Funny)
No (Score:4, Insightful)
No. Next!
Rationale? We already have JPEG for lossy and PNG for lossless and now that GIF is off-patent we have that too. All of these have un-encumbered implementations. Having lossless and lossy in one format doesn't really offer much of an advantage. Unless this new image format gives me time-traveling X-ray vision into whatever the picture is, why should I care? Extra compression is nice, and it might be worthwhile if you were archiving terabytes of image data. Most web sites are not, so even if it has better compression it's still not worth the hassle of switching. Bandwidth and storage are just not that expensive. In other words, it would have to totally blow away the existing formats by some performance metric. I have a hard time believing the ammount of effort to switch things over could be justified. What could possibly be that much better about any new image format? Anyone remember JPEG 2000? The wavelet compression was really interesting, but it was proprietary, somebody was trying to make money off it, and so nobody cared. It's tough to enter a market where the price is already set at ZERO. The existing product in such a market has to be inferior enough so that people are willing to pony up the extra bills. An example of where this has happened in the recent past is the compiler market. People were willing to pay extra for the Intel compiler even though GCC is free, because the Intel compiler generated faster code. It's been a while since I've looked into that, so I don't know if that's still the situation. Even with the performance difference, many people still just stuck with GCC rather than pay more. This is not MS-bashing. It's just basic economics.
It's not the format, stupid. It's the license. (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft, just like any other vendor on the planet, is free to submit anything they like into standards bodies, and ask that they be accepted or considered for use in the world. If Microsoft's new format is useful, fantastic, we all should start using it.
But if, and only if, that format comes free from the burden of licensing or copyright. We've seen how damaging these restrictions can be to simple file format (remember ARC? And all the fun that went on with GIF?) - If Microsoft is releasing an idea for folks to use and adopt? Excellent. If they're pushing an internal format that they hold a patent on, and are requesting other vendors to adopt it? Then it's simply Microsoft once again trying to dick over the industry. And I can't see how it can possibly work under those circumstances.
They don't have the big stick they used to. This is no longer 2000, where the corporate juggernaut simply needed to wave it's financial might and the net doth tremble before it. Microsoft has to tread carefully on an increasingly powerful free software world.
We'll see how this goes. Me, I'm waiting to hear more information.
Um, no. (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, never mind Microsoft. Let's look at the audio arena. The royalty-free OGG format should have bumped off MPG, but still device manufacturers are all too happy to pay Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft to use MP3. In fact, it's still hard to find devices that support OGG at all. The moral of the story is that it's really hard to get anyone to commit development costs to support a new standard, let alone beat out one that's widely supported, even if you are giving away the tech for free.
And WMA was supposed to be the end of MP3... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure the format has a boatload of patents associated with it that would preclude it from being used in any open source projects.
Heck, if JPEG2000 and MP3Pro can't catch on, what makes them think this will?
Vista supports 128 bit internal rendering of gfx (Score:4, Interesting)
It is possible that in 2009, people will be buying wide gamut, high dynamic range displays in numbers, so it will become evident that the old graphic file formats aren't going to look as good anymore. HD Photo can fill that need by having the high bit rate for more expressive colors, as well as offering compression comparable to JPEG so that it can be used online. It also offers the flexiblity to trade files uncompressed for maximum detail.
I suppose everyone can use a format like OpenEXR for high bit info, but I don't think it compresses as well as HD Photo.
Nevertheless, I am going to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt that they're not going to sue people for decoding HD Photo. However, I don't know how flexible they will be with people encoding it. I think now the general industry has wisened up to close formats and now will consider open formats from now on.
Re:Vista supports 128 bit internal rendering of gf (Score:5, Interesting)
Before Windows Vista, the OS was limited to 8 bits per channel (RGB) OUTPUT for the video card. The video card will only get 8 bit of data per channel from the OS, so even if you have a nice ATI card that can do 10 bit per channel (RGB) output from the port, it's still being fed 8bpc data.
Cards from Matrox that can output 10 bit grayscale for 10 bit monochrome displays use DirectX and special drivers to overcome this limitation. Matrox video cards also support 10bpc in Photoshop using a special plugin/driver. However, you have to run the plugin and switch away from the Photoshop interface to see the extra bit of colors.
I know that OpenGL can do high bit rendering, like in the case of the nVidia Quadro cards, or just using floating point representation. The Quardo uses 128 bit precision for all the fancy 3d effects. However what you're seeing on screen is limited by 8bpc output of your video card (though a quadro supports 12 bit output)
Windows Vista supports 128 bit at the OS level. That means you can have a video card that can output 10bpc (for 30 bits total) and it will contain real information that let's say a nice HDTV can read (using HDMI). Or you can just open a regular RGBA image (32 bits) and using a some sort of 3d program to do fancy compositing using different textures and store the information in 128 bit (or the lesser formats; look at MSDN for the various encoding schemes) for speed.
The point is, Vista has the headroom to really display images that contain more than 8bpc (RGB). I'm hoping that Linux would follow suit (it will once HDR displays become commercialy viable) and I believe Mac OS X Leopard will also have this high bit output support (though I have not found any evidence of that yet.)
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Read the Wikipedia article (Score:5, Informative)
Before slamming the format, please read more about it. Regardless of what you think about Microsoft, I think it has great potential. Some highlights:
Also, take a look at http://labs.live.com/photosynth [live.com] and http://blogs.msdn.com/billcrow [msdn.com]. To quote one thing from his blog:
IMHO this seems like a well-balanced format that has most of the advantages of a cornucopia of different formats (JPEG, JPEG 2000, RAW, TIFF) without the corresponding disadvantages. If it's not successful, I at least hope something equivalent is!
can't be trusted: we need an alternative (Score:4, Insightful)
It's trivial to do that: instead of changing the bits, you add a list of transformations to the image header. Trouble is: when such a format comes from Microsoft, they will have numerous patents on it and Microsoft will use those aggressively to maintain their monopoly. It doesn't matter that it's obvious how to do this. It doesn't matter that they weren't the first to invent it.
The world does need a better alternative to JPEG, but it must not come from Microsoft. The FOSS world should instead repeat what happened with PNG and Ogg: create an open, patent-unencumbered format.
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Re:PNG (Score:4, Informative)
This won't be the end of anything unless it is unemcumbered by patents, and as a previous poster noted, it isn't. So, this is a non-event.
Perhaps the group that came up with PNG can come up with a patent-free replacement for JPEG?
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