P3D Re: JPS format images

[Brian Reynolds <reynolds@xxxxxxxxx>]

Greg Wageman wrote:
> From: John Toeppen <toeppen@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> >The software allows you to open bmps, jpgs, most of what you might
> >have as source images and paste them into DDS windows.  You get to
> >crop the images in a difficult and tedious way, and finally view
> >them. [snip]
> 
> All of this is true only if you run the Windows 95 operating system
> on your computer.  No other operating system (Linux, SunOS x86, Mac,
> Windows NT, OS/2, etc.) is supported.
> 

Solaris/SPARC isn't supported either.  That's why I'm switching to
anaglyphs for online presentation once my computer is back online.

> The JPS standard allows for a wide variety of internal
> representations such as anaglyph, interlaced, over-under and
> monoscopic images, strangely enough, which the JPS "stereo
> descriptor" accounts for.  In the absence of said stereo descriptor,
> the assumed arrangement is a right image first, side-by-side stereo
> pair.  So by renaming a JPG stereo pair in this format to JPS, one
> takes advantage of this default assumption.  But it is not the only
> possible internal representation by any means, and software which
> assumes it is may be in for quite a shock.
> 

This runs into a (non-stereo) pet peeve of mine.  Has whoever created
the JPS *proposal* submitted it to the JPEG standards committee (or
any of the other relevant committees, perhaps the W3 Consortium) and
had it approved as part of the JPEG standard?  Just because a company
comes up with a product that uses a new file format does not make that
file format a standard.  Standards must be openly available and openly
agreed upon.  (Yuck!  I hate the word "open" since the marketdriods
started abusing it.)

Until this happens I don't think we'll ever see JPS support on other
platforms, or in mainstream (e.g., Photoshop) software.

By the way, another pet peeve of mine is assuming that you can
determine file type by examining the filename.  Unfortunately this is
another problem popularized by Wintel.

-- 
Brian Reynolds                  | "Humans explore the Universe with five
reynolds@xxxxxxxxx              |   senses and call the adventure science."
http://www.panix.com/~reynolds/ | - Edwin P. Hubble


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