Join Amazon Prime and ship Two-Day for free and Overnight for $3.99. Already a member? Sign in.

Quantity:

More Buying Choices

28 used & new from $49.99

Have one to sell? Sell yours here

Share with Friends

The MPEG-4 Book (IMSC Press Multimedia Series)

See larger image

Share your own customer images

Publisher: learn how customers can search inside this book.

Tell the Publisher! I�d like to read this book on Kindle Don�t have a Kindle? Get yours here.

The MPEG-4 Book (IMSC Press Multimedia Series) (Paperback)

by Fernando Pereira (Author), Touradj Ebrahimi (Author)

3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

List Price:	$94.00
Price:	$73.32 & this item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. Details
You Save:	$20.68 (22%)
	Special Offers Available
	o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

Only 2 left in stock--order soon (more on the way).

Want it delivered Monday, July 20? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout. Details

16 new from $50.98 12 used from $49.99

Special Offers and Product Promotions

Purchase this entertainment book and get 12 issues to either Rolling Stone, Men's Journal or Us Weekly for $2.95 each. That's less than $0.25 an issue. Here's how (restrictions apply)

Calling All Indie Filmmakers! Why Wait to Start Selling Your Film? Through CreateSpace, make your film available for sale on-demand through Amazon.com and other channels in DVD and video download formats. No setup fees and no inventory needed. Learn more about selling your video content through CreateSpace.

Frequently Bought Together

RTP: Audio and Video for the Internet (Kaleidoscope)

Price For All Three: $225.31

Show availability and shipping details

This item: The MPEG-4 Book (IMSC Press Multimedia Series) by Fernando Pereira
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. Details
H.264 and MPEG-4 Video Compression: Video Coding for Next Generation Multimedia by Iain Richardson
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. Details
RTP: Audio and Video for the Internet (Kaleidoscope) by Colin Perkins
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. Details

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

RTP: Audio and Video for the Internet (Kaleidoscope)

by Colin Perkins

4.8 out of 5 stars (4) $51.99

Digital Video Compression (with CD-ROM)

by Peter Symes

4.0 out of 5 stars (9) $35.06

Introduction to MPEG; MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4

by Lawrence Harte

3.8 out of 5 stars (4) $17.59

The MPEG Handbook, Second Edition

by John Watkinson

3.0 out of 5 stars (3) $62.36

Video Codec Design: Developing Image and Video Compression Systems

by Iain Richardson

3.4 out of 5 stars (5) $108.00

› Explore similar items

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
The most complete, focused guide to MPEG-4, the breakthrough standard for interactive media. Offers powerful real-world insights for every product developer, software professional, engineer, and researcher involved with MPEG-4 and state of the art multimedia delivery.

From the Back Cover

The most complete, focused guide to MPEG-4—the breakthrough standard for interactive multimedia.

The comprehensive, focused, up-to-the-minute guide to MPEG-4
Practical solutions for next-generation multimedia applications
In-depth coverage of natural and synthetic audiovisual object coding, description, composition and synchronization
Binary and textual scene description
Transport and storage of MPEG-4 content
MPEG-4 profiles and levels; verification tests

MPEG-4 represents a breakthrough in multimedia, delivering not just outstanding compression but also a fully interactive user experience. In The MPEG-4 Book, two leaders of the MPEG-4 standards community offer a comprehensive, targeted guide to the MPEG-4 standard—and its use in cutting-edge applications. Fernando Pereira and Touradj Ebrahimi, together with a unique collection of key MPEG experts, demonstrate how MPEG-4 addresses tomorrow's multimedia applications more successfully than any previous standard. They review every element of the standard to offer you a book that covers:

Synthetic and natural audio and video object coding, description and synchronization
BIFS—the MPEG-4 language for scene description and interaction
The extensible MPEG-4 textual format XMT
Transport and delivery of MPEG-4 content
MPEG-J: using Java classes within MPEG-4 content
A complete overview of MPEG-4 Profiles and Levels
Verification tests

The authors also walk through the MPEG-4 Systems Reference Software ?offering powerful real-world insights for every product developer, software professional, engineer, and researcher involved with MPEG-4 and state-of-the-art multimedia delivery.

Part of the new IMSC Press Series from the Integrated Multimedia System Center at the University of Southern California, a federally funded center specializing in cutting-edge multimedia research.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

Paperback: 896 pages
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR (July 20, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0130616214
ISBN-13: 978-0130616210
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 1.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #914,022 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

	58% buy the item featured on this page: The MPEG-4 Book (IMSC Press Multimedia Series) 3.0 out of 5 stars (1) $73.32
	19% buy H.264 and MPEG-4 Video Compression: Video Coding for Next Generation Multimedia 3.0 out of 5 stars (6) $100.00
	14% buy Introduction to MPEG; MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 3.8 out of 5 stars (4) $17.59
	10% buy Digital Video Compression (with CD-ROM) 4.0 out of 5 stars (9) $35.06

Explore similar items

Suggested Tags from Similar Products

(What's this?)

Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).

secam(2)

avc(1)

h 264(1)

digital video(1)

ntsc(1)

pal(1)

video specification(1)

video standard(1)

charles poynton(1)

iphone dev(1)

Help others find this product — tag it for Amazon search

No one has tagged this product for Amazon search yet. Why not be the first to suggest a search for which it should appear?

Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store

If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store. Learn more

Customer Reviews

1 Review

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

Average Customer Review

3.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)

Share your thoughts with other customers:

Create your own review

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good explanation of the standard, but not really for application developers, May 29, 2006

By	calvinnme "Texan refugee" (Fredericksburg, Va) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

Because large parts of MPEG-4 are still unimplemented, and therefore were unimplemented when this book was published, it is mainly about how one would implement MPEG-4 according to the standard along with pretty good details on different parts of the technology. Unlike MPEG-2 where the killer application was digital television, MPEG-4 does not target a major and exclusive killer application but opens many new frontiers. The first two chapters are mainly an overview of the standard - its origins, its objectives, and its possibilities.

All components of an MPEG-4 presentation are discovered recursively through object descriptors (ODs). The details of this approach are explained in chapter 3. SDL is a convenient shorthand to express bitstream syntax of inherently object-oriented structures in a C++ kind of way, and is explained in detail in the context of MPEG-4 with several practical examples.

Chapter 4 on the "BIFS", binary format for scenes, is another practical chapter. This chapter presents the principles of MPEG-4 scene description, which is BIFS. BIFS is the scene description format designed by the MPEG Systems subgroup [MPEG4-1] to complement the object descriptor framework presented in Chapter 3. Whereas the OD framework defines the objects and their characteristics, BIFS defines how the objects are combined together for presentation. Numerous example are shown along with the scenes they generate to help explain the concept. You won't be able to help seeing the similarities between VRML and MPEG-4 scene descriptions.

Chapter 5 examines MPEG-J. MPEG-4 terminals may vary from high-quality TV set-top boxes to wireless and handheld devices. The computational capabilities and the network resources available at these terminals differ considerably. Without MPEG-J, these wide variations in resources would make it very hard to achieve the dream of create once, run anywhere. Thus, the objective of MPEG-J is to add to the presentation engine an application engine that can associate complex programmatic behavior with the presentation based on user input and terminal conditions. Although this chapter does a very good job of documenting what the MPEG-J API's shall contain and do according to the standard, the fact is that nobody has implemented them. This leaves the reader with the false feeling that this is something that is available.

Chapter 6 is about XMT, which is a textual representation of MPEG-4 system structures. These MPEG-4 systems structures are represented as XML elements, with attributes of the element containing its values. This can all become very complex, with considerable overlap between SMIL, MPEG-7, XMT, and X3D. This chapter does a good job of sorting out the difference and interoperability of all of the standards through diagrams and examples.

Chapter 7, Transporting and Storing MPEG-4 Content, details the delivery abstractions defined by DMIF (Delivery Multimedia Integration Framework), and then explains the FlexMux tool, which is a simple syntax to interleave data from various streams. This is followed by in-depth coverage of the MPEG-4 file format as well as the specification of MPEG-4 over MPEG-2 Systems transport. Finally, a summary of the ongoing work to define the transport of MPEG-4 over IP is provided.

From this point on in the book, everything is very theoretical. There are good clear examples of what speech coding, natural video coding, and general audio coding all are in general and according to the standard, complete with mathematics and good instructive figures. However, if you are coming to this book to find out who has implemented this part of the standard and how to use MPEG-4 audio coding "out of the box", in a practical sense, you will be disappointed. The only exception to this is chapter 12, on synthetic audio, where the AudioBIFS and Advanced AudioBIFS are introduced and explained via some very clear examples. Again, you are going to see big similarities between AudioBIFS and VRML.

In summary, I would say that if you want a good understanding of the MPEG-4 standard and the technologies behind it, you will not be disappointed. If you are coming to this book as an application programmer who wants to insert MPEG-4 capabilities into a program you are writing in much the same way that you download and use the Java3D API, you will leave unsatisfied, because much of this standard is yet to be implemented. Also, much has changed over the last four years so a second edition of this book pointing out what has actually been implemented during this time would be helpful. Given the book's age and lack of implementation details on the trickier parts of MPEG-4, I wouldn't recommend paying more than the discounted used-book price for it.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review

› See all customer reviews...

.jsOffDisplayBlock { display: block; } .jsOffDisplayInline { display: inline; } .jsOffVisibility { visibility: visible; } .jsOnDisplayBlock { display: none; } .jsOnDisplayNoneBlock { display: block; } .jsOnDisplayNoneInline { display: inline; } .jsOnDisplayInline { display: none; } .jsOnVisibility { visibility: hidden; } .jsOnDisplayBlock { display: none; } .jsOnDisplayInline { display: none; } .jsOnVisibility { visibility: hidden; }

Customer Discussions

Beta (What's this?)

New! See all customer communities, and bookmark your communities to keep track of them.

This product's forum (0 discussions)

	Discussion	Replies	Latest Post
	No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight

Start a new discussion

Topic:

First post:

Receive e-mail when new posts are made

Prompts for sign-in

[Cancel]

Guidelines

Active discussions in related forums

	Discussion	Replies	Latest Post
	textbook Textbooks for Kindle DX?	40	2 days ago
	textbook Does anyone use Discovering Geometry: An Investigative Approach?	5	2 days ago

The Textbook community

Latest activity 27 minutes ago

2,478 customers have contributed 3,182 products, 16 discussions and more...

› Explore the community

Explore more

› See all Customer Communities

› Your communities

Product Information from the Amapedia Community

Beta (What's this?)

Be the first person to add an article about this item at Amapedia.com.

› See featured Amapedia.com articles

Listmania!

The MPEG Standards: A list by calvinnme "Texan refugee"
Virtual Reality & Programming: A list by calvinnme "Texan refugee"
Προτεινόμενη Βιβλιογραφία (Wiley): A list by ekokkoris

Create a Listmania! list

Look for Similar Items by Category

Books > Computers & Internet > Computer Science > Software Engineering > Information Systems
Books > Computers & Internet > Graphic Design
Books > Computers & Internet > Web Development > Web Design > Web Graphics
Books > Entertainment > Movies > Video > Technical
Books > New & Used Textbooks > Computer Science > Graphics & Visualization
Books > New & Used Textbooks > Engineering > Electrical & Electronic Engineering
Books > Professional & Technical > Engineering > Electrical & Electronics > Electricity Principles
Books > Professional & Technical > Engineering > Telecommunications > Television & Video

Light It Up

Add light and beauty to your home with sconces from the Lighting & Electrical Store. Shop our extensive selection of indoor and outdoor fixtures.

›Shop all sconces

Best Books of 2008

Find our top 100 editors' picks as well as customers' favorites in dozens of categories in our Best Books of 2008 Store.

Buy Three Books, Get a Fourth Free

Order any four eligible books under $10 and get the lowest-price book free in our 4-for-3 Books Store. See more details.

Wake Up Dry

Customers are raving about the Malem Ultimate Selectable Tone, the bedwetting alarm that combines light, sound, and vibration to help even the deepest sleeper wake. Choose from eight variable tones or a single tone.

›Buy now