Digital BW, The Print

On Dec 6, 2004, at 7:06 PM, Anthony G. Atkielski wrote:

>
> Roger Howard writes:
>
>> But that would be the same argument against these other superior
>> compressors too... so it's not really a factor.
>
> It is for me, since it makes these newer compressors inaccessible to 
> me.

Oh I know, I'm just saying that when discussing new compressors, the 
lack of support for older platforms is pretty much consistently bad, so 
it's not a particular weakness of JPEG2000 (in fact, JPEG2000 is 
probably the most accessible, since it's an open format and there are a 
lot of implementations out there... it's just not widely used by 
individuals).

>> JPEG2000 is the best bet today, if you asked me as an archivist for
>> something superior to JPEG. There was just an archival-oriented
>> JPEG2000 conference a few months back, in fact. It's pretty widely
>> supported - though not deeply supported (very few apps can really
>> exploit it's cool *new* features, but lots of apps can just use it 
>> like
>> another flat image compressor).
>
> I actually have a plug-in for JPEG2000 in Photoshop 5.0.2, but it has
> never worked correctly.
>
> Does JPEG2000 provide any type of scripting or executable code features
> in the file format?

Nope, thank god! It's all client side, if you're referring to many of 
the nifty tricks they initially tried to sell it on. It's just a file 
stream - there is a lot of cool functionality that could be implemented 
- bitpeeling to deliver reduced size thumbs from the same master file 
as a larger view, some cool progressive loading options, regions of 
interest, etc. But no, it's just data.

Of course, probably all the same old exploits probably exist with 
JPEG2000... someone must have a Windows plugin that will happily 
execute arbitrary code in a JPEG2000 file, but that's not part of the 
spec.

>> There are free JPEG2000 converters to generate a
>> TIFF, for instance, without having to upgrade Photoshop.
>
> What about vice versa?  I could use a nice little converter that would
> generate clean JPEG2000 files from a lossless format, such as, say,
> TIFF.

Same... do a Google on "free JPEG2000 tools"... there should be a 
bunch, pick your poison :)

>> In fact, if you write code, it'd be an awfully short app to do it via
>> Quicktime APIs (which support JPEG2000 since v6).
>
> I've written code, but I don't really have much of a development
> environment set up at the moment.

Got it... it's just a handy library that supports JPEG2000 and is on 
many machines already... just a thought.