Nobody is keeping you from learning the file format on your own, and I'm sure there are at least some sources of information on it on the web, but it is quite complicated, and takes a lot of processing power to uncompress, so I wouldn't recommend it.
However, I think that if you were to use JPEG files in a commercial game you would stand to get sued for copyright infringment or something. But nobody is gonna sue you if it's just to learn (which I think it is).
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Visit the homepage of my (soon to be 'net multiplayer) Tank Game at http://members.home.net/chris-man
Its just the Encryption that costs money.
The .gif case has gotten rediculous now, because Unisys (is that the gif company?) is now trying to get royalties from anyone who even has one on their web pages.
Of course, this is illegal, and impossible to enforce anyway.
but JPEG comes from the same lovely people that brought you MPEG (motion picture expert group), so wouldnt it have some sorts of restrictions to using it?
oh well.. I still don't recommend using such file formats for games.
. However, the format is lossy so it's not a great choice anyway.If you want to, you can freely use PNG and again, the homepage has source for loading them.(http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/).
It's a jpeg library with heaps of documentation.
Here's the blurb:
The Intel JPEG Library provides a set of highly optimized C functions that implement JPEG compression and decompression on Intel architecture
processors. You may use this library if you agree to all terms and conditions of the License Agreement.
regards,
martin
