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by RespectYourself 827 days ago
To provide more specifics:

Red ripped off JPEG2000, and the derelict USPTO awarded them a patent on it... which was upheld at some point by some equally ignorant judge.

It's such a blatant rip-off that you can actually use an off-the-shelf JPEG2000 decoder to read Red's files.

Until software patents are ruled invalid (as they were supposed to be from the beginning), corporations will continue to use the patent system for exactly what it was supposed to prevent: the theft of other people's work.

Nikon managed to "prevail" over Red in a dispute over these patents, but not in a public-benefiting way. Red folded, but unfortunately their patents were not invalidated. So nobody should be crowing too loudly over this deal.

2 comments

Years ago you used to be able to open .r3d files after hex editing the magic header numbers with a generic jpeg2000 codec, but that's no longer the case with more modern variations of the file format (they encrypt it), but obviously the core image compression is still fairly similar (wavelets), but it's not like you got high-quality YCrCb data out of the .r3d file that way anyway (as you would if it was a true jpeg2000 file), you'd need to de-bayer it first (hence the two green channels you get, which effectively give it twice the resolution for green - somewhat similar to Chroma encoding like 422).
Dont forget patented RED Mini-Mag. Red alu case holding off the shelf SATA SSD.

Part 1 - RED MINI-MAG - Things you only thought you knew. Inside view, and RED SSD firmware - Jinni.Tech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEzLDqELh70

https://www.cined.com/whats-inside-a-red-mini-mag-the-contro...