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HD Photo Specification and Device Porting Kit 1.0

Time: 03:11 EST/08:11 GMT | News Source: Microsoft | Posted By: Jonathan Tigner

HD Photo is a new file format for continuous-tone still images that surpasses the limitations of existing image formats. HD Photo supports a wide range of features including:

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.

HD Photo is the new name for Windows Media Photo. Both names refer to the exact same file format. The Windows Media Photo name is still used to describe the implementation of HD Photo in Microsoft Windows products.

This is the released 1.0 version of the feature specification. It includes a detailed description of the container format, the metadata structure and values, 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

This specification covers the release of HD Photo (Windows Media Photo) included in Windows Vista and also supported on Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 through .NET Framework 3.0 or Windows Imaging Component (WIC). The HD Photo Device Porting Kit (1.0) is also availble for implementing HD Photo on other devices or platforms.

Update:

Bill Crow discusses the licensing and name changes on his blog.