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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.
Why does it have to be "for geeks"? Why can't it just be for people who are interested in digital video? I guess people who bite the heads off chickens at carnivals need their own special perspective on the topic, but I can't imagine that those people constitute a very significant market segment when it comes to video.
... and then they built the supercollider.
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.
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.
It would be nice if there was an episode about compression algorithms. Pretty much the whole video is about raw audio and video.
As a geek who previously spent all his time keeping *nix and windows systems running happily together, this was enough information to give me a curiousity spike, and enough information to google around.
Great video, and I hope there is more to come. Although I suspect the next video will be much less informative as I will be much more informed.
Good job Xiph.
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.
Your comment about an ebooks and wikis, is well taken and follow-ups to "flesh out" the information would be an extremely helpful next step to break down the various issues under discussion, as well as provide further instruction on how specifically to address various issues needed to bring the user community "up to speed". This is excellent in that it makes clear that although challenging this kind of knowledge need not be inaccessible.
The organization would do well to provide more mini-lectures to expand on each of the topics in greater detail and follow it up with outlined summaries, tutorials and soft-ware coding and details about hardware choices that are available and supported on open-source systems. This would be helpful to everyone as it would give developers and a more general class of users more power in the marketplace, as new projects develop and bring with them new communities of enthusiasts and students. For example, those interested in higher resolution video or high speed video, or audio-video interfaces could each bring critical mass to more specialized areas that in turn could stimulate interest by hardware vendors in meeting the specific needs of such users.
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, open software has the potential to do much to serve under-appreciated, under-served, and under-funded audiences the world over. Thats good for everyone, especially in a world where it grows easier and easier to be discouraged.
Really a great open source contribution. My congratulations to Monty and the rest of the crew at Xiph.org.
We came _this_ close to making the caption text use the hyperlinks from the wiki, but if we did that no one would ever finish watching!
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.
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.
Anyone who watches a 'Digital video primer for Geeks' is hardly a complete beginner. If you don't understand what binary is, you're really way out of your depth. Now, Fourier transforms may be more advanced, but the video tells you everything you need to know. In fact, possibly a bit too much detail just for an introduction. The frequency domain will likely be explained better later on, as compression enters the picture.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
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.
Excellent presenter!
Flawless editing!
Appropriate special effects!
The last chapter seemed a little out of place and out of character - maybe a teaser?
As a former TV geek(35 years ago, before I heard the siren call of software), I followed everything except the dot placement choices.
Never trust a man wearing a coat and tie!
Your VLC must be out of date if it cannot handle it. My 1.1.4 plays Webm just fine. There are links to others here
I also had some trouble playing it, I keep my ubuntu one release behind the "current" release for stability reasons so it is outdated but only slightly so. :) (don't know which plugin it uses or if it's the native video tag at this point)
Webm wouldn't work with any of my installed programs, and even the ogv file caused some trouble which is...unusual. It's been a few years since i got a video i couldn't play out of the box on my linux system.
I ended up playing the video in...firefox
Disclaimer: i know very little of media so it is likely classic PEBCAK. Ironically my ignorance almost prevented me from watching the very thing that would at least try to shed some light on the subject.
That said, the video is immensely interesting; I studied electronics (quite a while ago now) so a lot of it was familiar if deeply buried and for me it was about the right tempo, but I would imagine people with no introduction to the given material would have a hard time keeping up.
Anyway, cudos to the creator, it is a rare art to make something that "complex" accessible in 30 minutes.
Frankly, as someone that has tried several times to figure out codecs past the 'something ffmpeg takes as input in format a and spits out as format b", so far this is the best intro I've ever had. It makes assumptions that I know computers at a basic level . . . and that's it.
I'm definitely watching this all the way through.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media