Microsoft’s fledgling digital image format, HD Photo, is set to become a new standard file format. The Joint Photographic Expert’s Group (JPEG) announced plans to standardize HD Photo as a new format called JPEG XR (for “extended range”). From Microsoft’s press release:

The ballot deadline for this new project is early October 2007. Finalizing and publishing the completed standard is expected to take up to one year after that. Throughout, Microsoft will be working closely with JPEG to ensure that this new proposed standard serves the needs of the next generation of consumer and professional photographers and delivers the next experience in image display. If approved, Microsoft will offer a royalty-free grant for its patents that are required to implement the standard.

Congratulations to the HD Photo team! Bill Crow explains that his team has been working on HD Photo for a long time:

Our group at Microsoft’s Core Media Processing Team has been working on HD Photo for over five years. The underlying compression technology is based on work from Microsoft Research that goes back even farther than that.

We’re excited to be contributing to the next great standard for digital photography, enabling a whole new level of feature and technology innovation, improving photo quality and creating exciting new applications and services.

Awesome to see things work out so positively. I guess this means we’ll see an explosion of support for HD Photo sooner rather than later!

CNN officially launched their new, redesigned website today. The site, which has been in beta for a few weeks, includes many “web 2.0″ features like user generated content, podcasts, and a clean, simple layout. For a great overview of the new site, check out Read/WriteWeb.

Video (and multimedia in general) is a major feature of the new site. In the past CNN has been a major user of Windows Media formats, but that has changed with the redesign. All videos are now encoded to Flash (FLV) meaning you no longer need to have Windows Media Player installed to view them.

In fact, the only feature I can see that still uses Windows Media is the radio stream. The site says Live Video is coming soon, and that may use Windows Media as well. Otherwise, everything is either Flash or MP3/M4V (podcasts).

All video content at CNN.com is free, so they have no need for DRM. Thus, it makes sense to move from Windows Media to Flash, as more users/computers have Flash installed than Windows Media Player.

This seems to be a growing trend - moving video content to Flash. Call it the YouTube effect I guess. I wonder if Silverlight will do anything to stop this? Windows Media and the other codecs that Silverlight support offer much higher quality than Flash.

Time will tell!

StreamingMedia.com posted an interview today with Ben Waggoner, program manager for Microsoft’s codecs division. The interview touches on the differences between Windows Media Video 9 and VC-1, as well as how Silverlight relates to Flash. Here’s what he had to say about Silverlight and codecs:

[Silverlight’s] native A/V capabilities are chiefly Windows Media-based supporting WMV 9/VC-1, WMV 7 and 8 for video, and WMA and MP3 for audio. For streaming support, it uses Windows Media Services in Windows 2003 Server, and really starts to “sing” with the improvements coming in our new Windows Server, code-named “Longhorn”.

I haven’t seen any demos of the Windows Media Services improvements in Longhorn, but I haven’t spent much time looking either. Perhaps it’s time to dig something up - Ben definitely makes it sound intriguing!

Check out the full interview for much more.