14 DAY TRIAL // The Redmond Company has unveiled HD Photo still image codec Feature Specification also known as Windows Media Photo. Including container, metadata, image formats and Windows programming guide HD Photo is a file format for continuous-tone still images. With Windows Medias Photo, Microsoft aims to expand the limitations of the current image formats.
Here are a few of the features supported by HD Photo:
￭ Multiple color formats for display or print ￭ Fixed or floating point high dynamic range image encoding ￭ Lossless or high quality lossy compression ￭ Extremely efficient decoding for multiple resolutions and sub-regions ￭ Minimal overhead for format conversion or transformations during decode
"HD Photo delivers a lightweight, high performance algorithm with a small memory footprint that enables practical, in-device encoding and decoding. It delivers compression quality comparable with JPEG-2000 and more than twice the quality of JPEG," revealed Microsoft.
Delivering support for Windows Server 2003; Windows Vista; Windows XP, HD Photo Feature Specification 1.0 features a description of the container format alongside the metadata structure and values. Additionally, HD Photo includes: "the full range of supported pixel formats, the unique features and capabilities of the file format, and a guide to the Windows Imaging Components (WIC) interfaces and parameters."