Disruptive Library Technology Jester

Thanks, Noel, and everyone else who made the video editions of Code4Lib 2008 presentations possible. I just had a chance to notice that the video from my JPEG2000 to Zoomify Shim lightning talk was online:

Some updates since the post and the presentation were first done. The code that exists in the source code repository now was refactored to use JJ2000 as part of the Sun ImageIO package. We were seeing non-threadsafe problems with Kakadu and thought that using the multithreaded ImageIO package would help. Unfortunately, even with extensive caching, it did not. My next task is to bring Kakadu back into the picture using the threadsafe JNI implementation that is part of the ImageIO-ext project to see if that helps.

Two items of recent note in the JPEG2000 world. The first is the announcement of “the world’s first fully integrated wireless HDTV” that uses JPEG2000 over the air:

The High Definition LCD TV, featuring Pulse~LINK’s integrated CWave® UWB Wireless HDMI technology, will be on display for the first time at the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, January 7-10. [...] With the integration of CWave® Wireless HDMI, digital display products can be mounted anywhere in the room without needing to run data cabling from the TV to the content source, such as a DVR, Blu-ray or HD DVD player, or a live cable or satellite feed. Video data is encoded using the JPEG2000 video codec, the same codec used by movie theaters for “Digital Cinema,” providing a secure high quality HD experience. Pulse-LINK’s Wireless HDMI solution is engineered to be equivalent in both content protection and visual experience to a wired HDMI connection.

Xerox and the Library of Congress announced a joint effort last week to study the use of JPEG 2000. This is welcome news! The project is “designed to help develop guidelines and best practices for digital content,” a result that will be most welcome for those of us that want to do the right thing but lack the time and/or technical expertise to pin down exactly what the right thing is. I think it is safe to say that inertia has taken us this far with our collective TIFF-based practice, and even the most conservative preservationist would probably acknowledge that the state of the art has moved in the past quarter century to a point where there might be a better way.

On Tuesday, the Joint Photographic Expert’s Group (a.k.a. “JPEG”) announced a new work item for the standardization of Microsoft’s HD Photo as JPEG XR (XR is short for “extended range” — a reference to its improvement over the original JPEG standard). You can read the publicity details in the Microsoft press release and the JPEG press release, but beyond the public relations pieces I wonder if you are thinking about HD-Photo/JPEG-XR for digital archiving. And if you’re thinking that I’ll bet your wondering about how HD Photo compares with JPEG 2000. As with many things, the devil is in the details, so here is a first, gut-reaction pass at the details.