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First Installment of Xiph.org's 'Digital Video Primer For Geeks'
Ignorant Aardvark writes "Xiph.org just released the first installment in its video series 'A Digital Video Primer For Geeks,' which covers digital audio and video fundamentals. The first video covers basic concepts of how digital audio and video are encoded, and does so in an understandable fashion. The video is hosted by Monty, the founder of Xiph.org (the people who brought you Ogg), and explains a lot of concepts (FourCC codes, YUV color space, gamma, etc.) that many watchers of digital video have long been exposed to, but don't quite understand themselves. The intent of the video series (in addition to general education) is to spur interest in digital encoding and get more free software hackers involved in digital audio/video."
For what could be very stale subject matter Monty has done an excellent job of giving effective examples that engage and entertain.
Xiph.Org has been pushing for unencumbered codecs for over a decade and contributed to the creation of webm.
It might be more fair to say "WebM? Is Google working for Xiph now?"
Yes. Yes they are, and it is so sweet. Don't be evil sill means a little something sometimes.
Better than an ebook--there's a wiki page with a full transcript and helpful screenshots: http://wiki.xiph.org/A_Digital_Media_Primer_For_Geeks_(episode_1)
I wish they'd just written an ebook
Did you watch the bits where he demonstrated the difference between 8-bit linear audio vs 8-bit -law by manipulating the audio of his voice Or showed what clipping and Nyquist frequency aliasing sound like? Or showed the content contained in the Y, U, and V video channels by displaying them onscreen?
Try *that* with a book.
In general, I agree with you that a page of text is worth an hour of video, but in this case, the video is worth its weight in gold. And Xiph doesn't waste any time either: that video goes *fast*.
> I wish they'd just written an ebook
You mean something like this one? http://en.flossmanuals.net/theoracookbook
It would have been three hours long and covered half as much stuff it they took the time to explain every detail. Checkout the wiki for pointers to tons of background material.
Not so flawless for me - the link greys out firefox for more than 10 seconds and then there is no sound :(