Forgent to get rich from JPEG

http://www.dpreview.com ^ | July 18, 2002

[Old Airplane Driver]

That was a file that had been previously severely compressed with JPG and contained a number of artifacts. It was mainly posted just to demonstrate the capability of current browsers, not to demonstrate the compression capability of PNG. It is possible to do much better from a compression standpoint. I appreciate your concern with image size, as I maintain a couple of websites myself. I keep hoping that JPEG2000 will get more attention, as it potentially has greater compression capability than JPG and produces much higher-quality images. The neat thing about PNG is that it supports both 48 bit color and transparency. If you need transparency now, you are stuck with GIF and a 256 color palette.

In any case, the patents will soon run out and we will be free to use whatever compression technique and file format we wish.

[Old Airplane Driver]

Sony didn't ante up $15 million because they were cowed by legal threats, so one has to believe that the Forgent extortion has some legal merit.

[Richard Kimball]

Actually, there are several copy written file formats. .FLT (Open Flight - a Real Time 3D Polygon format used in Game/Simulations) being one of them

Yeah, I phrased myself poorly. Most of the proprietary file formats, though, are for use in somewhat specialized fields, such as game creation, etc. Jpeg is so common, it seems kind of like trying to copyright the letter A. (Darn, shouldn't have mentioned that. I'm sure someone will try!) BTW, I wasn't aware of the GIF issues others mentioned. GIF really isn't capable of doing even web based continuous tone images. Even with an optimized pallet, the color gamut is still pretty weak and the file size is monstrous to get a decent image up.

[Richard Kimball]

Sony didn't ante up $15 million because they were cowed by legal threats

Good point. Sony has impressed me as being a lot of things, but stupid isn't one of them (except, weren't they the ones that came up with the magic marker copy protection scheme?)

[Don Joe]

"Even when you buy image processing libraries for use in software development, GIF output is disabled until you get a license key from Unisys."

I don't think that's universal. I've seen something in the licensing for my copy of Visual Studio 6 that was quite convoluted, but what it boiled down to as best as I can recollect at the moment is that while Microsoft indeed paid a license fee so that they could legally include .GIF functionality in the product, developers who use the product would need to negotiate any necessary agreements with Unisys on their own if they wished to use any .GIF functionalty.

But, I don't believe that anything was disabled pending any third party agreements.

I don't doubt that smaller companies might not be willing to risk offending Unisys by selling working versions of their software, but as far as MS, that doesn't seem to be a factor.

That said, I never bothered looking into any of it, because I don't have any need for .GIF files. In fact, I despise them almost as much as I despise those accursed Flash ads that work overtime to annoy and distract. At least an animated GIF eye-poker can be stopped in its tracks by hitting the Esc key or the Stop button. Those &$*#& Flash ads have to be either scrolled offscreen, or covered with another window -- if you want to be able to read the content on the page without flashing lights aimed in your face.

[Don Joe]

"If you need transparency now, you are stuck with GIF and a 256 color palette."

Why not use .BMP?

[krb]

GIF is lossless compression, though 256 indexed colors. PNG is lossless compression with no limit of the # of colors.

[Quicksilver]

BMP files are large and have no compression.

[Djarum]

Forgent wants to see who will blink. There is a wealth of info on the slashdot thread.

[Don Joe]

"BMP files are large and have no compression."

Support for RLE compression was added in Windows 3.0.

[altair]

If I understand you properly, you're saying that they're running a scam and just trying to convince everyone they own the compression technology?

I think it's a scam. I quote the following from my libjpeg source code:

It appears that the arithmetic coding option of the JPEG spec is covered by patents owned by IBM, AT&T, and Mitsubishi. Hence arithmetic coding cannot legally be used without obtaining one or more licenses. For this reason, support for arithmetic coding has been removed from the free JPEG software. (Since arithmetic coding provides only a marginal gain over the unpatented Huffman mode, it is unlikely that very many implementations will support it.) So far as we are aware, there are no patent restrictions on the remaining code.

Smoke and mirrors.

[Quicksilver]

Compression used in Windows DIB can be RLE4 or RLE8. RLE8 is run-length encoding used for a 256 colors bitmap (8 bits-per-pixel) and RLE4 is run-length encoding used for a 16 colors bitmap (4 bits-per-pixel). Formats are using two modes: Encode and absolute. Both can occur anywhere in the bitmap.

Oops, I had forgotten about the RLE compression support in BMP, though it's limited to 256 colors. I guess it might work as an alternative to GIF.

[Abcdefg]

It's the "if you need transparency" part of the statement.

[Don Joe]

It can be done, which is why I suggested them in the first place. If you don't believe me, look at any Windows desktop and examine the icons. Note how they are not all square blocks. Or, look at the mouse cursor on a Windows machine. (These items are bitmaps, not GIFs.)

I'll admit that this is not my baliwicke, however I do recall having farted around with it several years ago in VB (probably Ver 4 or thereabouts). I remember assigning a certain color value that the system recognized as transparent when the images were displayed.

On top of all that, newer versions of Windows (I think it started with one of the '98 releases, but I never really used '98 so I'm not sure) support complete transparency operations (of 0 to 100%) for everything. (I've played with making application windows "fade away" to nothing as they evaporate over the rest of the desktop.)