Microsoft Move to be the End of JPEG? 447
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."
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.
Re:PNG (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nup, No, Nada. (Score:2, Insightful)
limited uptake as jpeg2000 vs jpg, mp4/wma/ogg vs mp3, png vs gif, etc As opposed to a rapid updake of Pentax's PEF raw format. How many browsers do you know that render that format?
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.
What does it cost? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Nup, No, Nada. (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.
Microsoft influence is waning (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Nup, No, Nada. (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to mention, I am highly skeptical of any attempt Microsoft claims to be making toward "standardization".
Re:PNG with bzip2 compression? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Cheating. (Score:1, Insightful)
It will be widespread within three years. All Microsoft has to do is pressure all consumer digital camera manufacturers into supporting it. Thats easily done - make it a requirement for a 'Certified Windows Vista Compatable' logo. Or just offer a cross-promotional marketing deal.
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.
Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL (Score:3, Insightful)
If it were true, then you would not be allowed to distribute or modify any image you created with proprietary software such as Photoshop.
HD (ot) (Score:2, Insightful)
HD is to this decade what turbo was to the '80s and extreme was to the'90s.
Re:Nup, No, Nada. (Score:3, Insightful)
Is that not pretty much the same as shooting TIFF in the first place, except that you're having Adobe or Apple's software doing the conversion instead of the camera's, and you have more control over the process?
I agree that pro photographers might want to do the conversion with more control. In fact, they would most likely also do similar processing to the TIFF. In fact, starting with RAW gives quite a few more tweaking options and could be a competitive advantage in getting better quality photographs to the news agency.
Did I miss something?
D
Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL (Score:1, Insightful)
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?
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.
Re:Nup, No, Nada. (Score:2, Insightful)
am I following this right? (Score:2, Insightful)
Are they completely hopped up on goofballs over there?
Camera manufactuers should be cautious (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems to me that using any new format is very high risk. You do not know what patents may exist on it - not only those held by the deviser of the format (which may be safely covered by a license agreement), but any held by third parties.
Of course even a format that has been around a while may be hit by an unexpected claim (as recently with mp3), but as a format gets olders the lower the risk, and once it has been in use for longer patents last, it is completely safe.
widely supported? (Score:3, Insightful)
Since Microsoft won't even be supporting it fully in their own apps (no evidence, but its just obvious right) I don't think it has much chance.
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
Yeah Yeah, but what's in it for Microsoft? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nick Powers
Re:May I borrow a hat? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Would you want your images succeptable to GPL (Score:3, Insightful)
This isn't about jpeg, this is about lock-in (Score:3, Insightful)
It is simple, the new image format is NOT compatible with the gpl, meaning that once you have chosen that format you will be locked in to using software that supports it. Hmmm, now wich software would that be. Ooh, I know, MS wants you to be locked into OS-X!
Oh, you thinks it is windows. Well I suppose if you are paranoid you could think that MS is trying to introduce a new format that would lock people to its own products by capturing their content.
For this to work MS doesn't have to destroy jpeg at all, it doesn't even have to touch it. It just has to make it that enough people use the new format that it becomes an essential thing.
Just imagine what happens to the web if IE supports this and other browsers can't. Voila, only IE (on windows) can be used to see the whole web. Wanna bet that losts of myspace and other social sites visitors where people upload snaps made with their MS phones would be laden with this new image?
With every thing MS does you simply got to ask yourselve this, "how can this be used to futher tie the user into using MS software exclusively".
If you look at the number of posts here that are about the format rather then the license then even slashdotters are taken in by it.
The real question (Score:3, Insightful)
If it does, then it's freaking worthless, no better than if I tried to tell everyone they could write text documents but had to pay me or I'd sue them. Because that's what happened with
There are plenty of perfectly good formats that don't require payment to anyone. USE THEM INSTEAD.
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.