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Windows Media Photo: a JPG alternative? a JPG-2000 killer?

  • Artigo

 Have you heard of the Windows Media Photo specification?  Neither had I, until today!

Windows Media Photo is an image file format that is optimized for digital photography.  To quote the whitepaper, Windows Media Photo:

"... employs a new, state-of-the-art compression algorithm... [that]offers image quality comparable to JPEG-2000 with computational and memory performance more closely comparable to JPEG. Windows Media Photo delivers a lossy compressed image of better perceptive quality than JPEG at less than half the file size. The same compression algorithm can also deliver mathematically lossless compressed images that are typically 2.5 times smaller than the original uncompressed data."

The WMP format allows for both lossy and lossless compression.  It requires no complex math, special hardware support, or substantial memory requirements.  It uses the existing TIFF container, including its approach to metadata.

WMP is part of the XPS (XML Print Specification), and as such, it has actually been discussed in the blogs for a while.  Its announcement last Wednesday at WinHEC, the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, has prompted some online articles, as well as discussion and debate about its merits and licensing story.

Does the world need another image format?  JPG2000 hasn't taken off, and arguably a major factor in its failure to launch has been the significant horsepower it requires to compress and decompress files with that format. 

With my photography enthusiast hat on, WMP really does seem to tick all the right boxes.  But it's going to need serious buy-in from the photography industry!  Consider it on the radar.

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