MPEG Video Compression Standard (Digital Multimedia Standards Series) [Hardcover]

Chad Fogg (Author), Didier J. LeGall (Author), Joan L. Mitchell (Author), William B. Pennebaker (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0412087715 | ISBN-13: 978-0412087714 | Publication Date: October 31, 1996 | Edition: 1

This book gives the professional and student one place to look for answers and guidance on MPEG. It incorporates low-level as well as sophisticated reviews of the major technical elements,and includes sufficient tutorial material that even naive users should be able to understand the answers to their MPEG questions. It contains many pictorial examples so that the benefits and limits of MPEG can be estimated from the data in the book. The full functionality of the entire MPEG standard is exclaimed. Guidance is given about the purpose behind some of the choices and implementers. Paricular emphasis is placed on the image compression of the MPEG standard.

Editorial Reviews

Review

`Ideal for an implementor to read in conjunction with the standards document, in which the code is not accompanied by comments...quite suitable for a text in video compression.' --IEEE Spectrum, September 1997

`If you had a long airplane trip and wanted to learn about MPEG video, this book should be in your carry-on luggage. The book authors are experts in standardization efforts...the book itself is very well done.' --Journal of Electronic Imaging, April 1997

Product Details

• Hardcover: 516 pages
• Publisher: Springer; 1 edition (October 31, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0412087715
• ISBN-13: 978-0412087714
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,593,404 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great book, but not the only one you will need., April 20, 2000

By 

Mark Holmberg - See all my reviews

This review is from: MPEG Video Compression Standard (Digital Multimedia Standards Series) (Hardcover)

Unlike some of the other reviewers, I found this book to be a great resource! The MPEG-1 codec is covered in some depth, including syntax. Other topics like MPEG-2 and rate control are also touched on. What this book (and most others on the topic) is missing, is an in-depth discussion on motion estimation techniques. The Kluwer book on motion estimation by Borko Furht will fill in some of the blanks, but is too expensive for what you get. All in all, I think this book is suited for someone wanting to impliment or understand an implimentation of the codec. It is not so much for the person looking for theory on video compression. The book, "Video Compression", by Peter Symes is a great one for that !

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars a very poorly written book, November 21, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: MPEG Video Compression Standard (Digital Multimedia Standards Series) (Hardcover)

Authors apparently don't know what to do with the space. This book is full of constant digressions into totally irrelevant subjects and surveys of papers published since 1960s, which have nothing to do with the MPEG standard. If the authors understood the subject, it would be interesting to hear about the colorspaces, etc., but right now the book sounds like an overview of papers and books that the authors have read. Expect 4-5 references to papers per page in chapter 4. If I wanted to read all those papers I would subscribe to IEEE. And even the summaries don't make sense most of time. In the first 70 pages it didn't seem that there was a single original explanation, chart or formula.

Overall: poor writing skills, lack of demonstrable knowledge, 90% of the book is made of summaries and quotes from other places. Paper quality, not a book quality. Not worth $$$.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Programmer's viewpoint, September 5, 2002

By 

Arnab Chakraborty (Stanford, California United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: MPEG Video Compression Standard (Digital Multimedia Standards Series) (Hardcover)

This is a great book to learn the mpeg1 format from. With its help you can confidently write a mpeg1 decoder. I have not read the official spec, but I found the descriptions given in the book quite lucid, in spite of the fact that I started to read this book without any video compression background. However, this is not a book on video compression in general. Surely a book on THAT topic would not have a title bearing the words "mpeg" and "standard". I have some experience in reading file format standards, and I only wish every file format standard would have such a nice book to explain it!

The book even covers fundamentals like DCT and Huffman coding (as much as is needed in this book). It has entire chapters on motion estimation and motion compensation. I like the way the book starts off with a general informative overview, rather than as a typical "standards manual" starting with a list of notations and fonts to be used.

The pseudo codes given in the book are taken from the original spec (with due references). These are explained with flowcharts.

If you are trying to learn video compression in general, then this is not the book for you. There are plenty of books on that topic. This book serves a much more esoteric purpose of elucidating the gory details of one of the most important video file formats, and it fulfils this purpose with complete applomb!