Customer Reviews

MPEG-4 Jump-Start

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The title and cover text of this book are misleading. Rather than being a general "get started" guide to MPEG-4, it is a detailed treatment of scene composition and animation tools. Important topics such as the Visual and Audio coding tools are hardly mentioned. Based on the book advertising material, I was expecting a much wider treatment of MPEG-4 and I think many developers may be disappointed with the relatively narrow scope of this book.

Having done some MPEG-4 development, I was rather disappointed by what passes for a "Jump Start". This was more like a
"Popped Clutch" when driving an auto with a manual transmission. The numerous references to the next book (not in print yet) left me fuming mad! Seemed like all of the stuff that's relevant to me (and I think most others) was deferred.

I thought that it really lacked a sense of coherence that I would have liked. I can only assume that this is because it is an aggregate work, but not described as such in its packaging. The authors acknowledge 17 people, but don't actually say that they've written significant portions (whole chapters) of the book. That kinda burned me too.

I would have expected that from a Sams "MPEG-4 in 21 Days", but not with this one. At least the Sams books that follow that format are better thought out. If they were going to take this approach, I would have preferred that they do the full treatment and get both books as one book for the same price. That way I could ignore half the content and not feel like I was getting ripped.

My thoughts on chapters:
Ch. 1 - Light treatment of the MPEG-4 overview. You'll get the basics of it, but there's nothing here you can't get from some web searching.
Ch. 2 - The VRML intro was nice and concise.
Ch 3 & 4 - Very detailed, compact and useful examination of BIFS and how things are ultimately decoded. Especially given the primitive nature of the MPEG-4 tools I've seen. A must understand before looking at XMT, because of the context it provides.
Ch. 5 - Quantization basics are good... then goes into detail way beyond what a Jump Starter would like.
Ch. 6 thru 9 - I personally don't care much for the pure animation focus of these chapters. There are some concepts in there I believe that are important generally in dealing with MPEG-4, but they get obfuscated.
Ch 10 - If you need specifics on 3D mesh coding, it's pretty good.
Ch. 11 - Good conversation on XMT that isn't as dry as "The MPEG-4 Book"
Ch. 12 - An unapologetic plug for the next book that (appears to have) all of the critical stuff Jump Starters need to know. How do you keep an idiot in suspense? The answer in their next book!
Appendices - Value depends upon individual need.

Save your time and money. This book is out of date and only contains a portion of the information you seek about MPEG-4. The remainder of the information you're looking for (i.e. Video compression, audio compression) is in "More MPEG-4 Jump-Start" according to this book. The problem with that is the second volume was never published.

According to one of the authors, the publisher (Prentice Hall) took the original text and split it in two. They published the first half and never got around to publishing the second. While some sites, like Amazon, have a listing for it and will take preorders, Prentice Hall has absolutely no reference to it. Both volumes were intended to be released in 2001. That's why I'm not holding my breath.

My suggestion is to look for the information you seek in another more current (and complete) text.

i'm developing mpeg-4 system and have lots
to read other than this book.
i feel like the first three chapters are a bit
verbal to me.
the authors could have made half the size of those parts.

the other chapters are useful to me.
i found some practical information about bifs encoding
and decoding process.

i hope the next print will be a well revised one.