HD Photo Preview

Last week at PMA, Microsoft formally announced HD Photo. For more information on HD Photo, head over to Bill Crow’s blog. The official press release can be found here. Here’s a summary of the important details:

• Microsoft is announcing HD Photo, a new format for end-to-end digital photography which offers higher image quality, greater preservation of data, and advanced features for today’s digital imaging applications
• The HD Photo Device Porting Kit, used to implement HD Photo in devices and other platforms
• Royalty free licensing
• A free set of HD Photo plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop, developed in conjunction with Adobe
• Microsoft is committed to standardizing the HD Photo technology

HD Photo overview & details:

• A new format for end-to-end digital photography which offers higher image quality, greater preservation of data, and advanced features for today’s digital imaging applications
• Key benefits include:
• Better Image Fidelity: Preserving all the original image content, enabling the highest quality exposure and color adjustments
• State of the art compression: Up to twice the efficiency of JPEG with fewer damaging artifacts, and scalable to lossless
• Powerful Features: Decode only the information needed for any resolution or region, or manipulate the image as compressed data
• Technical Details
• Support for the Widest Range of Pixel Formats
• High Performance, Low Footprint Algorithm
• Advanced Decoding and Transformation Operations
• Better image quality in a file that is up to ½ the size of JPEG
• Lossless and lossy compression with the same algorithm
• Lossy compression is much less destructive than JPEG
• An efficient, portable photo interchange format that preserves the entire dynamic range
• HD Photo Support in Microsoft products:
• Windows Vista in-box support
• Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 support via Windows Imaging Component (WIC), a free download
• Windows Imaging Component (WIC)
• HD Photo Device Porting Kit
• NET Framework 3.0
• XML Paper Specification (XPS) – The XPS format utilizes the HD Photo format to store image data
• Photo Info Power Toy
• Microsoft Expression Family
• HD Photo plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop

from
Microsoft Photography Blog

Visual Studio 2005 SP1 C++ compatibility issues

C++ team did it again and moved the limits, VC++ 2005 SP1 is crap.

For the people that need to use it, whatever the pervert reason, after installing SP1 and compiling projects with it, it won't run on client machines until applying patch with new redistributes.

Seek you folder for new version:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\BootStrapper\Packages\vcredist_x86

And deploy it on client machines.

WM Photo becomes HD Photo

Microsoft have changed name of new Windows Media Photo format, and introduced new name with new initiative of creating open standard successor for JPEG image format.

The main idea is overcoming crucial color space and color range problem of JPEG image format but also improving other important aspects like format performance and ease of hardware implementation, which is very important for camera manufacturers.

More about HD Photo

Video Inspector - Codec Info

If you're are unsure what codec some file is using, try Video Inspector.

DirectShow Filter Manager

Great free utility.
http://www.softella.com/dsfm/index.en.htm

WM ASF Reader Alternative

Source code for a WMV/WMA ASF file parser filter that connects to the standard File Source (Async). Supports seeking and set-rate, using the Windows Media Format SDK.

http://www.gdcl.co.uk/downloads.htm#WMFDemux

WM ASF Reader blackout...

This is annoying beyond words. Microsoft's own and only DirectShow Windows Media Reader is in deep problems.

So far, it seems that the problem is in Windows Media Format 11, and that the only workaround is not to have WMF 11 (comes with WMP 11 or WMF SDK 11).

We are currently working on solution, it will probably be custom written windows media source filter based on WMF 11 directly, but we receive very discouraging reports from users that have problems even with WMP 11 playing new VC1 encoded streams.

Microsoft it is Your turn, debug you're code, so many people depends on it.

J.

P.S.
Once workaround is finished and tested, binaries will be publicly available trough this blog.