"MainConcept, a worldwide leader in codec technology, has announced an aggressive new product roadmap. Together with the newly acquired Elecard team, MainConcept has been working for the past few months on a completely new codec lineup. The new message of MainConcept is "Every Codec. Every Platform." The goal is to offer all of the most-requested codec formats on all of the most-requested platforms."

"ER Mapper has released the source code to its ECW JPEG 2000 Software Development Kit (SDK). The ECW JPEG 2000 SDK allows software developers to add support for large geospatial images in ECW and JPEG 2000 format to their applications. ER Mapper’s ECW image format is the industry standard for large (multi-terabyte) geospatial images." Plus commentary from Directions Magazine.

Aware, Inc. has a demonstration server online with sample images from various collections. Contact Mike Serafino (+1-781-687-0336) for a username/password.

"GeoJasper is the FREE Geo supporting command line transcoder between JPEG2000 and other formats. i.e. Converts image data from one format to another correctly transferring Geo information between GeoTiff and GeoJp2™ (GeoJpeg2000). It supports striped as well as tiled TIFF images and TIFF images geo-referenced through World Files (TFW). Moreover it may combine three 1 band TIFFs into one RGB image. There are batch files supplied within the distribution to simplify command line execution.

"This software is FREE and Open Source... It's based on JasPer library and follows it's respective licence, which is totally free now! GeoJP2™ is a trademark of Mapping Science, Inc. The GeoJP2™ format is the intellectual property of Mapping Science, Inc."

There is also more information on GeoJP2 on the website.

From the website:

"What is it?
J2K-Codec is a software component, developed to facilitate JPEG2000 usage.
It can save you 8,000 lines of code, replacing them with a single line.

"Who should be interested?
J2K-Codec should interest virtually any person involved in the development of a program that works with graphics one way or another."

j2k is a free Photoshop and After Effects plug-in set for reading and writing the JPEG 2000 file format, the successor to JPEG.

Also known as JP2, JPEG 2000 uses wavelet compression as opposed to the DCT compression used in standard JPEG. The end result is better image quality in a smaller file. JP2 also includes mandatory metadata such as information about an image's color space.

The After Effects version has the ability to Auto Proxy, meaning that when working at half or quarter resolution, j2k will only need to read in a fraction of the file, resulting in dramatic speedups.

The JasPer Project is an open-source initiative to provide a free software-based reference implementation of the codec specified in the JPEG-2000 Part-1 standard (i.e., ISO/IEC 15444-1). This project was started as a collaborative effort between Image Power, Inc. and the University of British Columbia. Presently, the ongoing maintenance and development of the JasPer software is being coordinated by its principal author, Michael Adams

Part of Netpbm graphics conversion and manipulation package, jpeg2ktopam converts the named JPEG 2000 code stream file, or Standard Input if no file is named, to a PBM, PGM, PPM, or PAM file on Standard Output while pam2jpeg2k performs the opposing conversion.

"The JPEG-2000 specification specifies two different formats: JP2 and JPEG-2000 code stream (JPC). JP2 represents a visual image quite specifically, whereas JPC is a more or less arbitrary array of codes. JP2 images are a subset of JPC images. jpeg2ktopam converts any JPC image. If the color space identified in the image is grayscale (JAS_IMAGE_CS_GRAY), jpeg2ktopam generates a PGM image, unless the image contains only one bit per pixel, in which case jpeg2ktopam generates PBM. If the color space is RGB (JAS_IMAGE_CS_RGB), jpeg2ktopam generates a PPM image. If the input image is anything else, jpeg2ktopam generates a PAM image with no tuple type identified."