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."

Comments

Re:Very Informative

[iluvcapra]

For someone only partially familiar with video and audio encoding, this was a particularly clear and informative video. It also serves as an excellent example of the direction more Open Source efforts need to take. Mini lectures that bring some human explanation.

That's fair, and of course they're no doubt trying to emulate the success projects like Ruby on Rails have had with demonstration webcasts, but really what many people are looking for is something they can sit down with a cuppa coffee and a tuna sandwich and read. I doesn't help that there's really no reading material whatsoever on open source audio and video coding efforts, aside from man pages and forums -- completely unstructured and un-comprehensive.

Given that the closed source, proprietary society model is rapidly taking over everything else, those who want a modicum of freedom expression and fair markets...

If there is anything more annoying than the vegan-like moral posturing of open formats advocates, it's their unrelenting persecution complex at the hands of the Big Boys, and if there's anything more annoying than their persecution complex, it's their nervous libertarian tick of always justifying what they want in terms of "markets."

Re:Very Informative

[Anonymous Coward]

Then of course on the other side of the paranoid highway, we have the mini-tyrant apologists like yourself who, because they know they have zero chance of achieving Bigboy status on their own, side with them instead so they can live the delusion of being more powerful than they are.

Re:Thanks for the videos!

[sumday]

Jesus christ, that's like me complaining that I can't see the slashdot logo because I'm browsing the web in lynx. Get VLC and stop being a dick.