Disruptive Library Technology Jester

Today at IBC2009 Fast Forward Video (FFV) announced the launch of the JPEG2000 Alliance, “a consortium of broadcast industry leaders dedicated to ensuring that JPEG2000 continues to develop into a leading compression standard.” According to the press release:

In addition to developing their own JPEG2000 technologies and products, these companies will collaborate to ensure widespread acceptance, deployment, and support of the compression standard for the benefit of the media and video industries. Activities will be centered on educating and creating awareness about the benefits of JPEG2000, promoting interoperability between standards and system devices, and promoting the development of tools by members and industry peers.

The lead article in the September/October issue of D-Lib Magazine release yesterday is on djatoka, the open source JPEG2000 Image Server from Los Alamos National Laboratory. The authors, Ryan Chute and Herbert Van de Sompel describe their effort in the article abstract:

The ISO-standardized JPEG 2000 image format has started to attract significant attention. Support for the format is emerging in major consumer applications, and the cultural heritage community seriously considers it a viable format for digital preservation. So far, only commercial image servers with JPEG 2000 support have been available. They come with significant license fees and typically provide the customers with limited extensibility capabilities. Here, we introduce djatoka, an open source JPEG 2000 image server with an attractive basic feature set, and extensibility under control of the community of implementers. We describe djatoka, and point at demonstrations that feature digitized images of marvelous historical manuscripts from the collections of the British Library and the University of Ghent. We also call upon the community to engage in further development of djatoka.

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The JPEG2000 in Archives and Libraries Interest Group of the LITA division of ALA is pleased to present a program on Archiving in Practice with JPEG2000 on Sunday, June 29th from 8am to 10am in Ballroom E, Anaheim Convention Center.

The lead presentation will be given by Justin Dávila, Digital Media Workflow, Business and Technology consultant. The formal presentation will be followed an invitation to the audience to present five-minute lightning talks on the topic of JPEG2000 for cultural heritage archiving and access. More details can be found in the announcement on the j2kArcLib.info website.

This is a textual representation of a lightning talk done on Feb 26th at Code4Lib 2008. When the video of the talk is up (thanks, Noel!) I’ll link it here, too. The video is now available, and that article includes an update on progress since the this article was posted.

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.