berkus wrote:Non-compressed BMP is free of patents. Using compression may be not.
Well, that suits my needs at the moment - I just need an easy way to get at photo data and compression only gets in the way of that. I'm now writing code to try to identify items in images, based at the moment on colour, textures and directionality of lines within different patches of similar pixels. In the future I'll obviously want to compress images, but I'll use jpg, and again Wikipedia suggests that the format's effectively free of patents, even if certain companies are unsuccessfully trying to claim it as theirs (see near the bottom of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.jpg). I notice right at the bottom of that page that there's a public domain jpg compressor and decompressor available (C++ source file), so the way is open to putting this in your OS.
By the way, I've also got round the problem of widescreen not being supported by VESA on my netbook by stretching 640x480 images to 640x600 in an 800x600 screen mode, so circles now look like proper circles: four lines can be turned into five by using line one as the new line one, line four as the new line five, (line 2 + line 3) / 2 as the new line three, (line 1 + line 2 * 3) / 4 as the new line two, and (line 4 + line 3 * 3) / 4 as the new line four.
