Microsoft announces "Windows Media Photo" as an alternative to JPEG

After taking on audio compression with Windows Media Audio and video compression with Windows Media Video, Microsoft is now developing its own alternative to JPEG: a format called Windows Media Photo.

The main “selling point” of Windows Media Photo will be better quality at half the size of current JPEG files. For the Internet, it means faster web browsing and quicker email downloads if all pictures are put in the new WMP format; for digital cameras and portable media devices, it means a whole lot more, better looking pictures than currently possible.

However, if Microsoft insists on using only Windows Media Photo on its own websites and forces other partner sites to do so too, it will end up making a sizeable chunk of the web inaccessible to those not using Internet Explorer (which will obviously be updated to support this format). That is unless Microsoft considers releasing the decoding algorithm for the community to make a Firefox or Opera plugin, which is something I’m not going to put a lot of money on…

Update: The porting kit for platform-independent decoding of the format will be released by MS. Smart. :)