JPEG2000 Coming Soon 489
Sonny writes "In a few months time, internet users will be able to make use of the JPEG2000 standard which, its developers claim, enables web graphics to be downloaded much faster than is currently possible. This will not only make graphics-heavy web pages easier to download, it will also preserve image quality. The JPEG standard compresses image files which are then transmitted across the web faster than uncompressed files. Now, researchers at universities around the world have developed JPEG2000, the next-generation image-compression technology under the auspices of the International Standards Organisation. It is the first major upgrade of the standard since it first appeared in the early '90s. What is also important about the technology is its ability to send files without loss of data, which is not the case with current JPEG files. To take advantage of a JPEG2000, web browsers will need a Plug-In for either Internet Explorer or Netscape browsers. These free plug-in's are expected to be available later this year. The extension for the new files will be ".jp2"."
A bit late... (Score:3, Informative)
ciao
PNG? (Score:1, Informative)
Meh (Score:1, Informative)
Re:It's obvious where this is going. (Score:5, Informative)
You're talking about the difference between 300k and 20k. The reason that
JPEG2000 has a few things going for it:
- Familiar Name
- Familiar Standard
- Smaller filesizes
- Likely to be better supported by IE and other browsers
Mozilla & jpeg2000 (Score:5, Informative)
Doesn't seem too promising:
If you look at appendix L of the jpeg2000 draft, there are 22 companies who believe that implementing the spec may require use of their patents.
PNG still hasn't taken off despite being supported in all major browsers (now if only IE did proper alpha, any year now...), how much chance does an image format that requires third party plugins have?
Re:PNG? (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry, try again. An image compessed with PNG (even at the highest compression setting) will tend be considerably larger than the image compresed with JPEG. What PNG gives you is lossless compression and an alpha channel (that's not even properly supported in many browsers).
found this nice comparasion (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's obvious where this is going. (Score:3, Informative)
It does, you just have to use the IE-proprietary AlphaImageLoader filter (it's a CSS extension). I agree this is a pain in the ass, and why they just don't support the alpha channel with regular img tags is beyond me, but at least with a little PHP or Javascript you can make it work.
Jason.
will it actually get off the ground.... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wow! (Score:1, Informative)
Slashdot's original announcement. [slashdot.org]
(oh, incase you were wondering what that ^^^^ thing was, it was me poking the post above for being a complainer himself.
comparisons to other formats (Score:5, Informative)
the report compares 4 compression codecs, and found for a small sample found:
MEAN LOSSLESS COMPRESSION RATIOS (big is good)
------------------
JPEG 2000: 2.5
JPEG-LS: 2.98
L-JPEG: 2.09
PNG: 3.52
JPEG-LS is was usually the best, but PNG had a few really good sample that pushed its average up. Actually, these outliers appear important, because that is what really separates the codecs on this metric.
Lossless Decoding Times, relative to JPEG-LS (big is bad)
-----------------
JPEG 2000: 4.3
JPEG-LS: 1
L-JPEG:
PNG: 1.2
This doesn't make JPG2K appear too impressive. What it does offer, however, is features. Like Region Of Interest (ROI) coding, good lossy compression, random access, and other goodies that some people may really care about. The report claims that png doesn't do lossy encoding, which is news to me, but it does appear to be one of their major selling points for jpeg-2000 over png.
B SD-licensed JPEG-2000 implementation (Score:5, Informative)
a BSD-style license.
It's been tested at the MIT biodmedical department already for compression of medical images.
It's available at http://j2000.org/.
It would be nice to see this work in my favourite browsers.
What's cool about JPEG2000? (Score:5, Informative)
JP2 uses wavelet compression such that an image is effectively compressed at various resolutions below the originally, independently. Not only does this allow a high level of redundancy removal (which is why wavelets are good in the first place) and thus high compression, but jp2 tags each of these sections (subbands) separately in the compressed file.
So what? Well, a file with all of these sections is effectively a losslessly compressed image. However, this file can be further compressed (loss-ily) by simply throwing out some of these tagged sections! That is, you can make a "lossless" thumbnail image by keeping all the lower resolution subbands. Or, you can get a lower-quality (but smaller) fullsize version by throwing out some subbands at each resolution.
Better still, this manipulation can be done without decompressing the original image. Simply using only certain tagged sections of the file.
Consider this possible application of all this: Digital Cameras. A camera could take images at full resolution and lossless quality until the memory card starts filling up. Then, gradually as more and more room is required, it could quickly reduce the size or quality of previous pictures to make room for new pictures. Thus, you always have "enough" room for more pictures, provided you don't mind the quality reduction.
Of course, there are numerous uses for web applications -- thumbnails and full-sized images could be the same file, provided the web server knows how to parse the image file. (Little or no computation necessary, just sending parts of the file)
Anyways, JPEG2000 is very very cool.
Re:Plugin for IE? (Score:4, Informative)
Um, no. I don't want to upgrade to a browser by a company who wants to bend standards in their favor, leaving other browsers unable to cope. The advantage to Netscape Style Plug-ins over ActiveX controls is that they play in other browsers like Netscape (DUH!) and Opera. This isn't a case of an old standard no longer being followed, it's a case of MS changing the de-facto standard so that IE remains dominant. So no, I'm not willing to change browser/OS/etc over this.
Now that IE doesn't support non-standard controls, this means that anybody who makes an IE plug-in is stuck making an ActiveX interface.
My favorite browser is Opera. It doesn't support ActiveX. According to their site, it won't support ActiveX. Here's a quote:
"Opera does not support ActiveX, nor does it support VBScript. There are three reasons for this:
Opera Software AS is committed to supporting open Internet standards, recommended by the W3C, something neither ActiveX nor VBScript, being license issued Microsoft technologies, are.
The second reason is much more simple: There's just not enough market demand for these technologies to warrant the cost of implementing them.
In addition, some reports raise the question of how secure ActiveX is. It has been claimed that ActiveX has serious problems with security, and some even say that the problem is an almost complete lack of security. The same concerns have been raised about VBScript."
So besides making me stick with an insecure plug-in interface, what other reason is there for me to go to IE6 or newer?
"Changes sometimes need to happen, and given that by the time the change to 6.0 happened there was no plugin that I ever ran into that didn't have an ActiveX version, there's no reason for your ranting. "
Changes? Sure! But to disable a widely used technology? Uh uh. Sorry. I'm not rolling over and taking that. True narrowmindedness would be if I were to say "Okay Microsoft, thank you for making the choice for me. You know more than I do!"
As for not being able to get an ActiveX version of a plug-in, I can give you an example: The company I work for. (Who shall remain nameless.)
IE 6's betas supported our plug-in just fine. And then, once it was released, I had customers telling me it no longer worked. Somewhere between beta 2 and release they removed support for it. Did they tell us (a registerred MS Developer...)? No. They just did it. Their knowledge base called the removal of Netscape Style Plugins 'a security feature."
Interesting, I guess not being able to run as much stuff means less chance of security breach. Whatever. Maybe if MS had said "In 6 months when IE 6 is released, it won't support NSP's" Id have little room to gripe. But MS just did it. So my company (a startup company I might add) is forced to write an ActiveX control. We looked into it, and its not as easy as it may seem. For one thing, our product has a lot of web-based features that would all need to be rigourously tested. Since browser functionality is not our core focus right now, we don't have the engineering time to spend on it. Do our customers understand that? Only after I explain our priorities to them.
The worst part is that IE doesn't give any clue as to what is wrong. The behaviour of running a NSP on IE is the same as not having a plugin installed at all! What a wonderful way to prevent MS from getting customer service complaints!
In any case, thanks for calling me narrow-minded even though it's pretty obvious I know more about this topic than you do.
Getting back to the original topic, I hope the JPEG2000 group releases a Netscape Style Plugin so I can use it with Opera. I am geninuinely concerned that what they'll do is release an ActiveX version because IE is the dominant browser, and that's it. If they do that, they'll be further supporting MS's dominance. Unfortunately, I can see JPEG2000 causing that if the images are really as compressed as they say.
Re:Patents, Patents and more Patents (Score:3, Informative)
I don't recall Compuserve ever promising that, in fact at the time they made GIF nobody really thought software patents were workable...except the patent office.
Plus if CompuServ tells me I can use Unisys's patented crud, why should I believe them? I only trust what IBM says about IBM's patents. Likewise for JPEG2000, I'll believe I can get a royalty free license only if the patent holders sign for it, not 3rd parties.
If you look at RAMBUS you will see they made a similar promise when they were at the JDEC meetings that eventually produced SDRAM, and while they did sue, when someone finally decided not to settle RAMBUS got spanked. Hard. So while it ain't perfect, there is some reason to believe it will work out Ok.
Re:PNG *is* a god-send. (Score:5, Informative)
This site [dpreview.com] illustrates the difference in quality between JPEG and JPEG2K. You get essentially a 5x reduction in storage space without losing quality, and the type of artifacts aren't as annoying, either.
To be redundant and sum up. (Score:4, Informative)
If there's any indication that this will actually be out in a few months, I missed it.
If there's anything indicating JPEG2000 support for Mozilla, The Gimp, Paint Shop Pro, or Photoshop in the near future, I missed it.
I've yet to see anything that indicates there are no more patent issues and that people can support this format without patent issues (Read "Can the Gimp ship with this?")
Regarding Exploer PNG support:
AlphaImageLoader Filter [microsoft.com]:
Displays an image within the boundaries of the object and between the object background and content, with options to clip or resize the image. When loading a Portable Network Graphics (PNG) image, tranparency--from zero to 100 percent is supported.
Just because I do miss it, I still see almost no support for the beloved fractal image format *.fif I think it's now part of LizardTech's [altamira-group.com] line of image compression/fractal tools. If you think jpeg200 offers compression, then you missed the fif format completely.
Comparisons with PNG/GIF (Score:2, Informative)
What thrills me even more is the possible application of wavelet compression algorithms in 3D.
See this for a dramatic flash-based demonstration of advantages - notice that it says 4kb!:
http://www.luratech.com/index_e.html
Re:JPEG does have a lossless mode (Score:2, Informative)
First, compression efficiency. Although lossless and near-lossless quality isn't hugely better, data rates for "good enough" quality (defined as where the image is understandable and artifacts aren't too distracting) are much, much lower. Unlike the old Discreet Cosine Transformation (DCT) method of JPEGs, which get blocky at high compression, wavelets get softer, which is much less obvious. So, this might not help things with pro digital cameras much (which were lightly compressed in the first place), it will help a lot with web images and such, or consumer digital cameras.
The other nice thing about wavelets is that they are constructed in bands. First, the base image is encoded at a low resolution. Then this is used as prediction for the next resolution, and that band only has to store how the image is different from the prediction.
This is groovy, because you can decode the individual bands as they're transmitted, giving a low-resolution proxy image once only a few percent of the file is transmitted, getting progressively higher quality over time. While progressive/interlaced JPEG/GIF gets the same effect, wavelets do it more efficiently.
Many years ago, Intel created a video file format that used these properties, IVF. Didn't ever get any market traction. You can still get the tools from Ligos.
A shipping browser plugin and a very good SDK (Score:3, Informative)
Dr. David Taubman was one of the authors of the JPEG 2000 spec. His book on JPEG 2000 is now available. He has also released a very nice SDK for compressing, decompressing, manipulating and streaming JPEG 2000. It's called Kakadu and you can read more at http://www.kakadusoftware.com/. The source code for Kakadu is packaged with the book. There are demo images and software at this site also.
jpeg 2000 vs PNG (Score:2, Informative)
Re:PNG *is* a god-send. (Score:3, Informative)
SVG is the most fantastic vector based graphics format ever created. Not only is it fully scalable to what ever size you care to scale it to, but it's all done in XML, which means scripting graphics creation is nigh on basic.
Since SVG is basically text, the file sizes are tiny! Add to this the fact that svgz (gzipped svgs) are part of the svg standard, and you end up being able to create fully interactive vector based animations weighing in at less than 1K (try this [xml.com] -it's a perfect example of how cool SVG is)
As it stands now, SVG can only be viewed on IE and NS4 with a plug-in, but Mozilla supports it natively if you enable it ;) It's a more important standard to propergate than JP2 IMHO.
On the PNG front: PNG is so much better than any other format for layout graphics on web pages. It's alpha tranparency and colour pallet is all you need (it runs circles around GIF). PNGs should be the internet standard for non vector graphics, but alas, IE does not render them properly (the colours get twisted and changed as far as I've experienced). If MS could stick to standards, it'd make the internet a whole lot better.
Anyway, in conclusion, JP2 may sound nice, but there are much more important formats out there that need to be adopted before JP2, which will not only cut down the transfer sizes of graphics, but make web development just that much easier for people like me.
Re:It's obvious where this is going. (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, the reference is on MSDN's site [microsoft.com].
It's not complicated to use, it's just awkward, and you need to use PHP (or Javascript, or some other solution) if you want it to work in both IE in Mozilla. Here's an example of how I've done it in the past:
<img src="blank.gif" style="filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.A
<? } else { ?>
<img src="imagewithalpha.png">
<? } ?>
The implementation of this in IE seems to be pretty good -- at least I haven't run into any problems with it.
Jason.
Re:PNG *is* a god-send. (Score:3, Informative)
SVG is a good vector format for the arena it was designed to serve (primarily, the web). For other uses, the text based markup is a tad bloated, and the fact that it's easily scriptable isn't a factor. It's not perfect, but the web needs a good, open vector graphics format, and SVG is a well designed option, in most ways. I just wish they'd get the fonts right [levien.com]. Of course, Flash has been providing web based vector graphics for ages. It's just that it was always aimed at presentation, and didn't take into account accessibility, searching, consistency of navigation and all the other things that we should expect a vector format to provide. In that respect, SVG is a significant step forward, and I hope it starts to gain widespread acceptance soon. But with even Mozilla not supporting it in many of the standard builds, it has a way to go before that stage.