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The software maker detailed the new image format Wednesday at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference here. Windows Media Photo will be supported in Windows Vista and also be made available for Windows XP, Bill Crow, program manager for Windows Media Photo, said in a presentation.
WinHEC in view
plus other coverage
of the Microsoft confab
"One of the biggest reasons people upgrade their PCs is digital photos," Crow said, noting that Microsoft has been in contact with printer makers, digital camera companies and other unnamed industry partners while working on Windows Media Photo. Microsoft touts managing "digital memories" as one of the key attributes of XP successor Vista.
In his presentation, Crow showed an image with 24:1 compression that visibly contained more detail in the Windows Media Photo format than the JPEG and JPEG 2000 formats compressed at the same level.
Still, the image in the Microsoft format was somewhat distorted because of the high compression level. Typically digital cameras today use 6:1 compression, Crow said. Windows Media Photo should offer better pictures at double that level, he said. "We can do it in half the size of a JPEG file."
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Not only does compression save storage space, which is especially important for devices such as cell phones and digital cameras, a smaller file can also print faster, transfer faster and help conserve battery life on devices, Crow said. "Making a file that is smaller has all kinds of benefits."
The compression technology is also "smart"--it is possible to process only part of a huge, picture file to show a smaller version, Crow said. Additionally, Microsoft's new image format allows such things as rotating the image without the need to decode it and subsequently encode it again, he said.
The new image format was received with cautious enthusiasm by some of the WinHEC attendees. Ralf Mueller, an application planner at mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson, said he would look into the new format just as his company looked into supporting Windows Media Audio and Windows Media Video.
"Considering our development cycle, I could not see us supporting Windows Media Photo before 2008," Mueller said.
Steven Wells, a part-time professional photographer, said he sees promise in the new file format. "The JPEG artifacts make it almost unusable for professional photographers," he said. "Windows Media Photo is possibly the first viable compression format."
Yet, success will depend on adoption, Wells said. Microsoft will need to get players such as Adobe Systems and Apple Computer on board to win over the graphics professionals, he noted. A major unknown is licensing, which Microsoft has not yet addressed. "Licensing can kill this," Wells said.
Windows Media Photo was developed by the same people who worked on Windows Media Video and Audio, Crow said. The image format takes a new approach to compression as well as color space and color conversion, he said. Furthermore, it gives a lot of flexibility, including in the pixel format and bit rate, Crow said.
Microsoft has finished the first official version of the "porting kit" software needed to build support for Windows Media Photo into devices and platforms other than Windows. It should be available soon, Crow said.
Licensing details for the technology are still being ironed out. These could be a concern, Crow acknowledged, but "the philosophy has been that licensing should not be a restriction" to adoption, he said.
See more CNET content tagged:
WinHEC, Windows Media, JPEG, professional photographer, compression
For those of this that can afford to pay for a decent operating system no doubt we will be getting this included in the price. If it really stores pictures at the same quality in half the size of JPEGs, then evey digital camera maker on the planet is going to be adopting it quicktime.
I guess if you cant afford a license and use legacy solutions like Linux then you might have a problem, but dont worry - im sure someone will write a downgrader to translate it for you.
Yep, another substandard, half-baked standard to be built-into Windows and to be imposed on the poor huddling masses. Have they found the security bugs yet?
"A major unknown is licensing, which Microsoft has not yet addressed. "Licensing can kill this," Wells said."
Why will anyone pay for this? You got it right on the ball! In a world moving to royalty free open standards, you're going to ask people to pay money for "somewhat distorted" images?
"Windows Media Photo should offer better pictures at double that level, he said. 'We can do it in half the size of a JPEG file.'"
JPEG can do it in half, a quarter, a tenth, of JPEG size by changing the compression settings. So what's new?
"Not only does compression save storage space, which is especially important for devices such as cell phones and digital cameras, a smaller file can also print faster, transfer faster and help conserve battery life on devices, Crow said. 'Making a file that is smaller has all kinds of benefits.'"
In an age of multi gigabyte flash memory cards, smaller file sizes with "somewhat distortion" are not exactly what we need. Oh, wait, there is an advantage to smaller file sizes! You can open the files in Windows without crashing it!
Perhaps the issue is that you could transmit photos at the same or better size than current tech with superior resolution.
Yes storage is cheap but it has to get there first.
Similarly Microsoft Office is the market leader in office suite. There are 3-4 other companies like Corel, IBM and lately Openoffice making office suites, but Microsoft is still the market leader. There are so many products specifically designed for Word, like Endnote which is used to handle bibliography (it doesn't work in corel or Openoffice). The point I am trying to make here is that they can innovate and become market leader too.
As far as licensing goes, don't you have to buy Macromedia Flash (though flash player is free), don't you have to pay for Adobe Acrobat (though Acrobat Reader is free), you have to pay for Microsoft Word (Word reader is free). You even have to pay for Photoshop (though software to view jpeg and png etc. is free)
When GIF first came out, it was licensed to Unisys and any program capable of making GIFs had to pay royalty, still it was a leader at the time of dial-up modems because it gives good compression.
So you should analyse and try it before you give such a strong opinion
licensing doesn't mean MS is going to force people to pay to use their format. just so you know, the jpeg format is owned by a group, though one of their stipulations is no licensing fees. mp3s, though thought by many to be free, are actually supposed to be licensed from the group that created it (ie, not free).
What are the chances the WMP to JPG comparison will be similar?
Besides the total lack of quality in these MS licensed formats,
who wants something that will have no backward compatibility
with anything?
At least the JPG format is universal, free, and compatible with
everything.
Good luck getting the Mac (graphics people) onboard with this.
Release Vista first, then you can worry about converting the
world standard in photo compression to MicroS**t
Jpeg has stayed around because of three things.
1. It's universally supported by computers and viewing systems.
2. It's widely available to hardware manufacturers in chipsets & firmware.
3. It's relatively simple, so allows for quick processing time on low end systems.
The third of these is the killer. My canon 30D can take jpeg photos faster than RAW ones, and with memory prices tumbling, this is the only advantage to the lossy format over the lossles one...
Unless microsoft can provide a format which is faster than jpeg, with less artifacts, there is no application for this software, J2K could have done the rest half a decade ago, it's just no one wanted it to.
And let's look at the history of the group that produced the new format. This seems like the equivalent for photos that they did for music files with the WMA format. (IMO) WMA provides all the quality of the MP3 format for a fraction of the file size. Nearly all devices worldwide support the WMA format now and I suspect we'll see the same adoption with this new format if it is as good as it sounds.
the Internet.
Now I see why Microsoft has these new photo initiatives - a
student photo contest and a photographer's summit in June in
Redmond.
1: Aperture is Mac-only.
2: Lightroom comes out Mac-only at first.
Still photographers are still in large Mac supporters.
They have to do something. If they can unseat jpeg, more power
to them! But it will have to be more than just better then JPEG
and JPEG2000. It has to have some compelling reason to unseat
the standards that exist.
And with expanding hard drives, and RAW being the only really
viable format to shoot with and provide a lossless archive
format, any format that causes a loss of image quality is just not
good enough. It's worse than not good enough.
I don't think it will fly. But if it does, as long as they handle it
smartly it could be a good thing.
Speed of processing and ubiquity are the main advantages of jpeg.
As processors get faster and storage gets cheaper the compression and file size concerns become less important.
I think it is a good thing that companies are looking to make advancements in compression as these techniques will always be useful.
The only disadvantage with such format is that they're introducing (again) closed format.
---
Pixel image editor - http://www.kanzelsberger.com
The only disadvantage with such format is that they're introducing (again) closed format.
---
Pixel image editor - http://www.kanzelsberger.com
web search for a product called "GraphicConverter" on
versiontracker.com and you will see it can import 185 different
formats and export them to 45 formats. Many of these 185
formats are old, rarely used, or proprietary, or worse yet, just
second or third rate formats. You can add M$'s newformat to
this last category. Don't even get me started on the licensing
aspect.
I have yet to see the product myself, but in the M$
presentation... "the image in the Microsoft format was somewhat
distorted because of the high compression level..." As I said
before, there are already over 100 lossy formats to choose from.
There are also several non-proprietary lossless formats to
choose from which of course have nothing to do with M$.
Lastly, the battery savings angle is just silly. Not an issue these
days.
Buh-bye now.
You obviously are neither an advanced or pro photographer. I should probably stop commenting here since all you know about picture quality is that there are an enormous amount of formats out there, which is true. I'll keep commenting a couple of more statements.
"I have yet to see the product myself, but in the M$ presentation... "the image in the Microsoft format was somewhat distorted because of the high compression level..." As I said before, there are already over 100 lossy formats to choose from."
You pick up what you want to percieve it to be I guess. For us photographers the highest compression, which is the one you are quoting, is not of interrest. The rates giving better quality but still being more compressed ARE the ones interresting us. And, FYI, this format is NOT "lossy" which is another very important feature. That was said in this statement:
" Additionally, Microsoft's new image format allows such things as rotating the image without the need to decode it and subsequently encode it again, he said. "
"Lastly, the battery savings angle is just silly. Not an issue these days."
Sure is an issue for us photographers. We need to have 2 to 4 extra batteries with us. Taking several hundred pictures an hour the batteries die out fast and being in the bushes, for ex., makes it hard to constantly recharge them.
---
Pixel image editor - http://www.kanzelsberger.com
supports it: Corel PaintShop Pro.
---
Pixel image editor - http://www.kanzelsberger.com
GIF is not opensource it is openformat.
PNG is not opensource it is openformat.
PDF is not opensource it is openformat.
GIF is patented and was introduced by a big bad internet company of the past..Compuserve.
Please...list all image formats that are openSOURCE that are in common usage.
If MS decides to implement this tech as openformat then you will quickly find MAC and LINUX software that will use it. Why would the bother working on that right now when they sell WINDOWS products not MAC or LINUX products.
I'd like to add that maybe we all should be getting a hint in the nic on especially one of the kids making such a childish post, his nic being Maccess. Wow, wonder how indoctrinated you have to be to even create a personal nic relating to a brand name.
As many of us know, there are a lot of Mac users who could be said to belong to a so called Mac sect. Can't reason or talk to these ppl, they are brainwashed. Everything related to Bill Gates or Microsoft will be attacked no matter what the issue.
To the news. I, as an advanced amateur photographer with over 25 years with SLR cameras and a lot of past darkroom experience, am very impressed with the first information received here. No lossless rotation, faster dSLR picture taking with this format, better compression with less quality loss. Deffinitely filling the gap between JPEG and RAW format. Seems too good to be true. Lets hope it holds up and that the liscensing issue will work out.
Btw, I'm a Mac and PC technician and network engineer. Every OS works better than others at certain things.
To refer to our posts as that of "one of the kids with a childish post," when all we posted was a point by point rebuttal of the discussions presented in the article does not speak well of your own maturity and technical expertise.
If you care to comment on technical aspects of the article, please feel free.
Your claims that you have "25 years with SLR cameras and a lot of past darkroom experience,"Btw, I'm a Mac and PC technician and network engineer." sound more like an advertisement for your own ego more than anything else.
So do you regularly troll the lists finding places where you can post your credentials?
You must be so insecure of your own experience to be resorting to this.
Honestly, are your credentials genuine or did you just make them up?
make my work better: no matter where it comes from. These
forums seem to attract "fanboys" from every sector of the
computer world and I'm really tired of it. Here's hoping that
MS's new format will revolutionize the digital photo world!
and there really is no need for a format that is going to be most
likely tightly controlled by one company. So why pay for it?
If you can guarantee me that it can generate files that have no loss
at a 24:1 compression ratio, then maybe it would be worth it.
Otherwise there is no reason to help Microsoft take over yet
another market.
"Each of those claims are already being available with existing products."
If it still has the same functionality but works better, it's worth considering. A better mousetrap, while it still just traps mice, is still a better mousetrap.
specification for toasters. Hardware manufacturers can license the
new specification and bakers can get their bread Microsoft-
certified. Windows Toast functionality will also be added to
Windows Vista. Bill Gates was quoted as saying "this is a major
innovation in toast."
I'm concerned that, sometime in the future, Microsoft may hold my photos for ransom, requiring that I purchase an upgrade to view them. Or, even worse, that Microsoft may drop support for the format; and since it's proprietary, there wouldn't be any other viewers available.
If they want us to like it, they should open their format and forget DRM.
Finally I don't see DRM having anything to do with a consumers implimentation of a photo format.
It just gets irritating seeing your type of comments which frankly are almost entirely ignorant. Learn a bit more before you open your mouth pls.
share of their sector of the marketplace like they did on the
desktop.
For that reason alone, MS may seem major industry resistance to
their jpeg rival, their acrobat rival, and any other copycat
product they may choose to release.
The Open Document Format situation may be a harbinger of
what MS can expect to face in the future.
No need for another standard. JPEG is just fine for amateur photography. PNG is just fine for other small footpring applications. Professional photographers use RAW and that's not going to change anytime soon. RAW is needed for post processing and editing.
additional proprietary tags and an MS patented
pixel codec. Now, what they describe isn't as
good as JPEG2000 -- it has blocking artifacts
and such, and it basically botches TIFF (it
doesn't even fix the image size limitations of
TIFF).
So, I guess this is really a non-starter for
widespread adoption, particularly since there's
no demand for it right now, and there are
already better established alternatives.
Stick to PNG and let MS spin their wheels on Crack Rock file format .0.0.1.
The point of the article and the point of Microsoft's new technology is to decribe a new methodology and file format for lossy data compression. It might help if you understood your tools better and where they're supposed to be used, then you'd understand the significance of the article and the utility of the new technology.
Me? I still remember the problem with GIF and the Web when Unisys started talking royalties. That combined with Microsoft's less than stellar track record with respect to market capture techniques means I wouldn't be caught touching a Microsoft data format like this one with a ten foot pole.
- Like Apple Pict but better
- by gggg sssss May 25, 2006 8:12 AM PDT
- But 95 percent of the worlds computers will support it fully
- Like this Reply to this comment
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