Handling JPEG XR (HD Photos/Windows Media Photos)

I recently found some images on the internet in a format that I couldn’t directly support in my applications.  The images were in JPEG XR, with a .jxr extension.  These images would fail with a “The parameter is incorrect” error when loading the byte array into a System.Drawing.Bitmap (using Image.FromStream).

A little bit of research showed that the standard Drawing classes wouldn’t support this format.  I would need to use classes from the WPF library.  I added references to PresentationCore and WindowsBase, then wrote this function to convert the bytes of a JXR image to a standard bitmap:

    Private Function JXRToBitmap(bytes() As Byte) As Bitmap
        Dim s As IO.MemoryStream
        Dim dec As Windows.Media.Imaging.WmpBitmapDecoder
        Dim enc As Windows.Media.Imaging.BmpBitmapEncoder
        Dim bmp As Bitmap

        s = New IO.MemoryStream
        dec = New Windows.Media.Imaging.WmpBitmapDecoder(New IO.MemoryStream(bytes), Windows.Media.Imaging.BitmapCreateOptions.None, Windows.Media.Imaging.BitmapCacheOption.Default)
        enc = New Windows.Media.Imaging.BmpBitmapEncoder

        enc.Frames.Add(Windows.Media.Imaging.BitmapFrame.Create(dec.Frames(0)))
        enc.Save(s)

        bmp = New Bitmap(s)

        s.Dispose()

        Return bmp

    End Function

Since I didn’t know in advance what the file format was, the best I could do was attempt to load the bitmap and if it threw an exception, I would try to load it again using this function in the Catch block.  If that failed, then it would be a true exception.