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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."
I wish they'd just written an ebook, I think sometimes people lose sight of trying to impart useful information, and get wrapped up in making the information "fun and accessible." You could probably get twice the amount of information reading in an hour rather than watching someone mug in a video -- making it "entertaining" will only make the information more accessible to people who are likely never to use it.
PS. Available as OGG and WebM. Is Xiph working for Google now?
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Also, don't geeks already know these things? I mean seriously, I understand the general public not getting the difference between say, lossy and lossless compression, but a geek?
As I understand it, this is the first in a series, and explaining the raw data formats is the place to start. I assume compression algorithms will be covered in a followup. Or many followups.
He should seriously consider doing this for a living. One of the best lectures I have ever seen. I knew 99% of this stuff already (and more), but the presentation was _flawless_.
Having a bunch of links of stuff you couldn't be bothered to explain to arcane Wikipedia articles is not incredibly helpful to beginners. If it were we'd wouldn't need teachers and everyone could just use books.
I'm only focusing on this because at the start of the video they acknowledge beginners but then barely cater for them at all.
Maybe I just have a differing definition of a beginner, I would think a beginner would be someone who doesn't even really understand what binary is beyond it has something to do with 1s and 0s let alone a fast fourier transform.
And I'd love to watch them, but you decided to only post them in your own, unpopular and inefficient codecs/containers, and none of my media players support it. If they are trying to get people interested in free/open video encoding, they shouldn't post in a format that assumes the audience already cares about it. Won't be watching. Assholes. (Yes, I know they won't read this).
I hate grammar Nazi's.