Nice to see Lena again. She’s a great subject for exploring image manipulations.
"No, Safari views JPEG 2000 natively. (More accurately, WebKit does, as it works in OmniWeb too.) It does not require the QuickTime plug-in.
I proved this by renaming my Internet Plug-Ins folder, so that Safari wouldn’t be able to find the QuickTime plug-in (or any others). Worked fine."
Nope, no browser natively support JPEG 2000, not Safari, not OmniWeb, not Konqueror, nor anything based on KHTML/WebKit. You should try the Windows version of Safari and Konqueror, even with the latest svn builds, they can’t show JPEG 2000. So WebKit can’t view JEPG 2000 natively.
Here’s why we need JPEG2000 support added to our browsers:
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Alpha channels. This is the #1 feature in my world, as it would give designers the ability to seamlessly blend photographs into the rest of the page - without having to resort to pre-rendered static images like we do now. This is critical. (PNG does support alpha blending, but it gets unusably large for anything but the simplest computer-generated graphics. For photographs it’s hardly any better than uncompressed.)
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Smaller file size. Say what you want about bandwidth being cheap, cutting the file size in half will have a visible benefit to end users. Large photo galleries loading in half the time? Even Google Maps would benefit – you’d cut the lag between dragging the view around and map/satellite imagery appearing in half. Load time is still critical, even for broadband customers.
Clearly true browser and OS support would be ideal, but maybe the best way to raise awareness of Jpeg2000 would be to lobby Adobe to add support for it in Flash.
That way we’d have instant usable support for it in the vast majority of browsers.
taking uncompressed jpg screen shots of a compressed jpeg2000 image seems like a dirty paradox and i’m surprised my computer didn’t reboot.
Sounds like (from the Bugzilla entry) JPEG 2000 is held up by patent hangups:
"It seems that adding jpeg2000 support would get us involved
in a legal mess. If you look at appendix L of the jpeg2000
draft, there are 22 companies who believe that implementing
the spec may require use of their patents."
That makes Microsoft’s HD Photo format make a little more sense. It’s too bad that companies invest time and money in developing formats, then make them irrelevant by making them too much of a pain to implement. There’s a good chance that JPEG 2000 will never gain widespread acceptance.
"No current web browsers can render JPEG 2000 (.jp2) images, so what you’re seeing are extremely high quality JPEG versions of the JPEG 2000 images. "
OSX, Safari will.
To address the “no one’s using JPEG 2000” assertions variously made above, have a look at the Library of Congress’ “Sustainability of Digital Formats” webpage on JPEG 2000:
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/fdd000143.shtml
Note especially the comments on the evolving adoption landscape.
A number of libraries and archival agencies have been evaluating the format for the last six years (see http://j2karclib.info for more on this), and are putting J2K to good use in several heavy-duty applications like the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP):
Harvard University has made the Big Step and has designated JPEG 2000 as an official archival master file format to rest alongside the venerable but less flexible TIFF. Also the upcoming IST Archiving conference in Washington DC will host several papers (for the 3rd year in a row) on using J2K for archiving access purposes:
http://www.imaging.org/conferences/archiving2007/program.cfm
Ron M.
After all, even given that with todays explosion of bandwidth the advantage of .jp2 is small, it should not be such a big issue to add .jp2 support to a browser. The code is there and relatively small, so the ting doesn’t get bloated really, it has just to be linked in I think, there are no royalties to pay, it’s a comparatively simple action. So - why has it not been done? A mystery, as it makes the browser more attractive.
Suppose harping on about principles on the side of the open source community, trying to keep the web software development in their own house on the side of the well known Redmond based company.
Open-mindedness is something else.
OK, 3 years have gone by, and nothing seems to have changed. I’m busy documenting software that will characterize JP2000 files for digital archives (JHOVE2). So I guess people are using the format. But still no browser support! Not even Chrome, which is supposed to be cutting edge. What is this, some kind of strange pro-artifact conspiracy?
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Three years — try ten! And browser support is still basically nonexistent outside Safari on Apple hardware.
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And now, WebP is a thing. We live in exciting times!
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