Customer Reviews

Video Demystified, Fourth Edition (Demystifying Technology)

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

 

 

To begin with, the 4th edition of this book was released in autumn 2004, so all reviews earlier than that are referring to previous editions. I think that too many people buy this book and are expecting either "Video Algorithms Demystified" or "Video Processing Demystified". That is entirely understandable since "Video Demystified" could be talking about one or several areas of video and until you purchase the book you don't really know which one. This book should probably be relabeled as "Video Systems Demystified" to cause a minimum of confusion.

This book is most suitable for electrical engineers that are interested in video signals and their diagrams, video interfaces, connectors and their pin-outs, voltage levels, and digital data and video formats. There are many diagrams showing, for example, typical scrambler and descrambler circuits. The chapters on the video standards (MPEG-1,2,4) do a pretty good job of detailing the format of the video data as it is encoded, including all of the possible header fields, but there is virtually no discussion on any of the compression and motion estimation algorithms that do the actual encoding. There is one chapter on video signal processing, and it is very superficial.

The CD-ROM contains a large variety of color test images useful to video engineers trying to determine if their video system has any problems, and if so, produce a diagnosis. The one item in this book of particular interest to people with more of a computer science/algorithm interest in video would be the source code for MPEG-1, MPEG-2, H.261, and H.263 video encoders and decoders present on the CD. However, I have not tried out these decoders myself, so I cannot speak to their functionality.

In summary, if you are an electrical/electronics engineer involved in video electronics I highly recommend this book. If you are a programmer or someone interested in the algorithms of video processing, this book will probably be only moderately (3 stars) helpful. Thus, I split the difference for a 4 star rating. I notice that Amazon only shows the content for the 3rd edition, so I show the table of contents for the 4th edition next:
Introduction 1
Introduction to Video 6
Color Spaces 15
Video Signals Overview 35
Analog Video Interfaces 66
Digital Video Interfaces 100
Digital Video Processing 202
NTSC/PAL/SECAM Overview 265
NTSC and PAL Digital Encoding and Decoding 394
H.261 and H.263 472
Consumer DV 519
MPEG-1 Video Compression 543
MPEG-2 Video Compression 581
MPEG-4 and H.264 736
ATSC Digital Television 760
OpenCable Digital Television 778
DVB Digital Television 796
ISDB Digital Television 816
IPTV 831
Glossary 841

I bought this on the recomendation of someone concerning a technical question I had on Video signalling over SDI. It turned out to have about 1 paragraph on the subject, and didnt come close to being able to answer my question.

Having worked on Computers for around 20 years including writing and debugging mainframe assembler code, as well as many a day spent searching though page after page of hexadecimal, I am no stranger to bits and bites, and large libraries of thousands of technical reference manuals.

I have 3 problems with this book.

1) The title is deceiving. A more accurate title would be "Primer for decoder/encoder design" or "Video Signaling Reference Guide".

2) It cetainly does no "Demystifying". I expected a book that was structured and had a flow to it (as any educational book should) but found it to be written with absolutely NO PERSONALITY (like a reference book), and using terms at the start that then only actually get explained half way through the book!

3) There are so many tables and figures (overkill IMHO used too much to fill pages rather than explain anything well) with very little descriptions, and no keys to the diagrams. 90% of them also seem to be referred to by text many pages away from the actual graphics, which is just bad book design.

I am sure that the author really knows his stuff, and the book is full of very useful refrence information for designers, but for someone looking for an educational book on Video, you should look elsewhere, unless you have a fulltime engineer to sit with you as you read the book.

I can only recomend this as a reference book for those who already have a very good grounding in this field, or to be used in conjuction with another higher level book written by someone with much better educational skills.

This is supposed to be the Bible on all things video, but
the book falls short in many areas:

- Each successive edition has compressed old material and
added new material to the point where the coverage in
many areas is extremely superficial. Introductory material
has been hacked out.
- Terms are introduced and either not explained at all, or
explained pages later. A good editor should have read this
thing. It reads like it was pasted together.
- If the author broke the book into multiple volumes, the
book would benefit. I'd suggest one for digital standards,
and one for everything else (interface standards, video
basics, etc.). Then increase the total page count to restore
material trimmed out from previous additions.
- There are way too many useless, redundant pictures. Could have
used one picture along with a table to each resolution.

This book serves as a very good reference for video engineers. However, for a person new to the field of video encoding/decoding, I would not recommend this book.

This book is great if you need the full details on specific video technologies. It covers the precise timing patterns for many different broadcast video standards, it has all the equations for quadrature modulation of the color channel for all the major standards, it has detailed bit layout in packets for many digital video standards, etc. etc. It is really helpful if you have to implement one of these systems and want something that helps to explain the purpose of the standard as well as the details.

The book was in a great condition. It looked like a new book. The seller send the book very quickly. I am really happy with this purchase and would like to buy more books from this seller.

I was impressed with the quantity of information, and the depth of information, moreso regarding some of the "older" video technologies - like dealing with video interconnects and signaling (digital and audio).

I found the books organization to be very poor - in the way it would jump into discussions on things that it would never really describe what they are. For example, they made hundreds of references to the "YCbCr" color space (which appears to be the most popular and widley used)- but never (despite my searching) described what it *was*, as it did with other spaces. They started refering to "Macroblocks" long before any discussion of what they were, or video compression at all.

As a result, I felt I had to skim over a lot of the content of the book, as I didn't really understand the things they were refering to. No I went into it with some good understanding of video, so some of this isn't quite so bad - but from a standpoint of "Demystifying Video" - I don't know...

As a EE specializing in hardware development often related to video processing, I consider this my "Video Bible".