Saving snapshot to disk

Hi all, anyone else having problems saving a snapshot to disk? It seems like the only choice now is .j2c format. A lot of people are going to be angry if this is so. Any feedback?

Mine save as .bmp files, as ever. I wouldn't know a .j2c format if it kicked me in the shins and ran away laughing.

What version of the viewer?

It's .bmp for me on 1.18.2 (1)
I'm a Luddite!!

Not sure what version you're running....but I use windlight and haven't had any problems. There's a different menu when you take pics, and you have to open the drop down window to see all the choices .... But I never run any other version so I'm probably not the person to reply here LOL I just took pics last night, no problems tho.

Got it. I'm using the latest Nicholaz version. I tried the Windlight and official versions. Those save snapshots as .bmp
Thanks for the heads up!

FWIW, bitmaps (.bmp) are uncompressed). If you toggel the [X]Save compressed Images (or whatever the option is called) you get .j2c format

For anyone who's wondering, J2C is one of the file extensions for JPEG2000, the format in which SL stores images server side. Whenever you upload an image, regardless of what format you have it in on your own hard drive, it gets copied to JPEG2000 for upload. This is one reason it's not such a great idea to upload JPEG files, since JPEG and JPEG2000 both utilize lossy compression*. You end up with the "copy of a copy" effect, since you're losing quality twice instead of just once. Textures sourced from TGA, BMP, or PNG will always look better than those sourced from JPEG.

Anyway, if you're wondering why would SL output snapshots in such an under-used format as JPEG2000, think about it from an "ease of programming" standpoint. The viewer already has the capability to create JPEG2000's, since that's what it does every time it uploads an image. It's not much of a leap from there to get it to write the same type of file to your hard drive, rather than to the server. The viewer is also capable of outputting BMP's and TGA's for uncompressed images, but if you want it compressed, it makes more sense to use the compression engine already built in than to incorporate additional ones. The viewer's big enough as it is.

To open a JPEG2000 file on your computer, you can either use a good raster editor like Photoshop (the JPEG2000 plugin is on your Goodies CD that came with your copy of PS), or you can use any one of the many free JPEG2000 viewers available on the Web. Google for "JPEG2000 viewer" and you'll find tons. There are also numerous browser plug-ins available if you want to use something like Firefox to view a JPEG2000.

Sooner or later, I'd imagine all browsers will incorporate JPEG2000 support, but new image formats tend to take a while to catch one. And yes, an 8 year old format is still "new". Consider that JPEG has been around for 22 years, but didn't become commonplace until the Web took off in the mid to late 90's. PNG, which is a fantastic format, was first released in 12 years ago, finally became a standard 5 years ago, but still is not in terribly widespread use. For whatever reason, these things take time. If I had to guess, I'd give JPEG2000 about another 5 years or so before it becomes widely popular.



*Just to clarify, JPEG2000 compression does not have to be lossy. It is optionally lossless. SL's specific implementation of it, for the most part, is fairly lossy.

I use Nicholaz be-v, Windlight and the standard client and all will save snapshots as BMP for me, so I don't think it is a limitation of the Nicholaz viewer.

Uncheck Client / Compress Snapshots to Disk

Thanks, CF. Appreciate the insight.