XPS and Windows Media Photo

Those tracking the XPS specification should have noticed that in v.75 we introduced Windows Media Photo as a supported image format in XPS (look on page 12). Windows Media Photo is a new image format in Windows, but is also supported on other platforms. Here is general overview from https://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/wmphoto.mspx:

Windows Media Photo is a new file format for continuous-tone still images that surpasses the limitations of existing image formats. Windows Media Photo supports a wide range of features including:

• Multiple color formats for display or print

 

• Fixed or floating point high dynamic range image encoding

 

• Lossless or high quality lossy compression

 

• Extremely efficient decoding for multiple resolutions and sub-regions

 

• Minimal overhead for format conversion or transformations during decode

 

Windows Media Photo delivers a light-weight, high performance algorithm with a small memory footprint that enables practical, in-device encoding and decoding.

 

You can download the spec from the above site.  If you are developing products on non-Windows platforms (like for printers, scanners, cameras, etc) you can e-mail wmla@microsoft.com for a porting kit.  The porting kit is available this week! The porting kit includes the bitstream spec and source code.

 

To build XPS products you are required to provide support for Windows Media Photo.

 

- Andy