Talk:Spread Open Media/en/FAQ

---

AndreI's question

AndreL wrote:

> Why aren't GIF, JPEG, and JPEG2000 on this list?

JPEG2000: highly proprietary

JPEG: proprietary (?), lossy with little benefit only, too much inappropriate usage (poor quality images)

GIF: used to be affected by LZW84 patent, this is now expired, but still not fully free (?), obsolete, poor compression, 256 colors only. Problem: no usable PNG animation so far :-(

DOS386 07:42, 2 August 2007 (PDT)

GIF and JPEG are the only two formats you can rely on a web browser to properly decode, and for this reason are by far the most popular image formats on the web. (The most popular web browser doesn't properly decode PNG.) I'd like to know why they aren't considered sufficiently free. People on the JPEG2000 standards committee worked very hard trying to insure that free software implementations would be possible. How did they fail? Andrel

IIRC there is some patent trouble with JPEG2000 (don't know specifics) but to my knowledge JPEG (at least the usual baseline we're all using) isn't problematic (even the Forgent patent that caused some trouble in 2002 is expired by now). GIF, which is a tad bit dated, also apparently isn't covered by any patent anymore. Maikmerten 00:20, 3 August 2007 (PDT)

---

Saoshyant's latest addition

Saoshyant wrote:

> Is SOM related with PlayOgg?

> No, and if you actually want to help promote Open Media formats

> like Vorbis avoid them. Threat tactics, desinformation, and ignorancy

> do _not_ pass the message we want.

Please rewrite. It's _NOT_ obvious at all who of them (SOM, PlayOgg, Vorbis) is the good and should be promoted and who is the evil and should be avoided ...

DOS386 07:42, 2 August 2007 (PDT)

---