JPEG 2000 Viewer

• Introduction
• Installation
• Avoid clashes with the old JP2Raw plugin
• History

This plugin allows you to view JPEG 2000 images and thumbnails in Directory Opus.

The plugin is based on the J2K-Codec by Alex Saveliev. I would like to thank Alex for creating such a fast, inexpensive and easy-to-use library, and for his excellent support.

Various JPEG 2000 files displayed via the plugin.

This is actually the second JPEG 2000 plugin for Directory Opus, the first being my multi-format TGA, JPEG 2000, PNM, Rasterfile and Raw Digital Camera plugin (JP2Raw for short). The old JP2Raw plugin will eventually be replaced by several standalone plugins and this new & improved JPEG 2000 plugin is the first such replacement. JP2Raw is still needed for some of its other formats, so you should not delete the old plugin yet, but you should ensure that it does not clash with the new plugin.

The new JPEG 2000 plugin improves on the old JasPer-based plugin in several ways, mainly thanks to J2K-Codec:

• Much faster at viewing files.
• Much, much faster at generating thumbnails.
• Support for x64 (64-bit Windows).
• Support for alpha channels (transparency).
• Support for less common .J2C & .J2K code-stream data files.
• Support for Unicode filepaths.
• Support for Opus's USB-Mode.
• Doesn't call abort() on decode errors. (An aspect of JasPer which I dislike even more than its speed.)

The new plugin continues support for:

• 8bpp images.
• 16bpp images.
• Color (RGB) images.
• Greyscale images.
• .JP2 format files.

J2K-Codec speed comparison. Bigger means faster. (Source: J2K-Codec.com)

While the new plugin is much faster and generally better than the old JP2Raw plugin, there is one downside: J2K-Codec supports a slightly smaller subset of the JPEG 2000 standard than JasPer. For example, JPEG 2000 images with indexed colour palettes work in the old plugin but may display incorrectly in the new one. Such images are very rare (yes, even rarer than normal JPEG 2000 images!) so this is unlikely to cause you problems. J2K-Codec is so much faster than JasPer, and these images so rare, that this trade-off was an easy choice to make.

(By the way, I am not sure if anything, even the libraries costing thousands of dollars, actually supports the full JPEG 2000 standard. The standard is huge and tries to do absolutely everything with the result that much of it is rather esoteric. It seems unlikely that any one person or library would need or implement the entire standard, although there are definitely some which implement all or most of Parts 1 & 2.)

If you do encounter images which do not decode properly then please contact me and I will consider making a version of the plugin which falls back on the slow JasPer or OpenJPEG libraries for images that require it.

• General:

  • The plugin requires Directory Opus 9.1.0.4 or above.
  • Opus is installed to C:\Program Files\GPSoftware\Directory Opus by default.
  • Opus, unless configured otherwise, will continue to run even after all its windows are closed. See: How to Exit Directory Opus.
  • The 64-bit zip file includes both the 32-bit and 64-bit DLLs. The 32-bit copy in the x86 directory exists so that you can export a 32-bit version of Opus to a USB stick.

• Directory Opus 9 32-bit:

  1. Download dopus9_j2k_1002_32bit.zip (PGP sig).
  2. Exit Directory Opus.
  3. Copy the Viewers directory from the zip to your Opus installation (where there should already be a directory with the same name).
  4. Restart Directory Opus.
  5. See below to avoid clashes with the old JP2Raw plugin.

• Directory Opus 9 64-bit:

  1. Download dopus9_j2k_1002_64bit.zip (PGP sig).
  2. Exit Directory Opus.
  3. Copy the Viewers and x86 directories from the zip to your Opus installation (where there should already be two directories with the same names).
  4. Restart Directory Opus.

If you are using a 32-bit version of Directory Opus then you probably have the old JP2Raw plugin installed, since it comes with Opus. The JP2Raw plugin also handles JPEG 2000 files (and several other formats) and may clash with the newer, standalone JPEG 2000 plugin described on this page.

Since the new plugin is much faster you will want to ensure that the old plugin does not get in the way when viewing JPEG 2000 files.

Follow these steps to turn off the JPEG 2000 support in the old JP2Raw plugin:

1. Go to Settings > Preferences / Plugins / Viewers.
2. Select TGA, JPEG 2000, PNM, Rasterfile and Raw Digital Camera. (If it isn't listed then you can skip the remainig steps.)
3. Click Configure.
4. Select the File Formats tab.
5. Clear the JPEG 2000 (JP2) checkbox and click OK.

Select the old plugin and click Configure.

Turn off JPEG 2000 support in the old plugin.

Alternatively, re-order the list of plugins so that the new plugin is above the old one (if it isn't already):

Alternatively, re-order the two plugins if required.

(You could do both -- i.e. turn off the JP2Raw plugin's JPEG 2000 support and re-order the plugins list -- but that would be somewhat redundant.)

Version 1.0.0.2 (15th May 2008):

• Requires Directory Opus 9.1.0.4 or above.
• Initial public release.