Customer Reviews

Video Compression Demystified

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is superseded by my 2003 book "Digital Video Compression", ISBN 0071424873
Peter Symes
Author

I am an engineer who purchased this book seeking low level details that described file and data formats such that I could write software which interpreted, analyzed, compressed, or displayed compressed video. This book is written for salesman and marketing people who need a high-level description of the various types of video compression and formats without going into any implementation deails. The front cover highlights on insided content is misleading. A totally useless book for engineers - save your money.

I think this book is excellent and so far, the only text I have found that covers the technological fundamentals of digital video without resorting to complex mathematics. The section on the DCT transform is worth the cover price alone as it manages to explain a seriously difficult topic in simple language.

The comment in the previous review about MP3 is a little unfair in that MP3 has nothing to do with MPEG-3 at all and is in fact a subset of the MPEG-2 standard (which is covered in detail in the book). MPEG-3 was abandoned early in its development process and hence it is entirely correct that the reviewer should focus on MPEG-2 and MPEG-4.

This edition appears to be a slightly updated version of an earlier book published in 1998 called "Video Compression". It is reasonably well-written and contains a lot of information that seems still useful, but from the point-of-view of someone who doesn't know the field it leaves me wondering if I don't need a more up-to-date text.

For example, he mentions MPEG-3 in passing only as a failed improvement to MPEG-2 video, but isn't MPEG-3 (MP3) a wildly successful standard for audio? I get the feeling that when he wrote the book 5 years ago this wasn't something that would occur to the average reader to ask, but in 2003 it just leaves me wondering how MPEG-2, MPEG-3, and MPEG-4 are related, if at all.

Another minor nit: for an introductory text he has a bad habit of using terms before he has introduced them. This may be a product of updating an earlier text or simply bad editting, but for example, he uses the term "lossy" on page 5 but doesn't introduce the term until page 8. Even though I think I know what "lossy" means, I got stuck on page 5 for about 5 minutes trying to figure out why I had missed a definition for this term.