A Practical Guide to Video and Audio Compression From Sprockets and Rasters to Macro Blocks

Learn all about Codecs--how they work, as well as design and implementation with this comprehensive, easy-to-use guide to compression. After reading this book, you will be able to prepare and distribute professional audio and video on any platform including streamed to the web, broadcast on-air, stored in PVRs, Burned onto CD-ROMs or DVDs, delivered by broadband, or viewed in Kiosk applications, PDA devices, and mobile phones.

Chapter 1: Introduction to video compression; Chapter 2: Why video compression is needed; Chapter 3: What are we trying to compress?; Chapter 4: Film; Chapter 5: Video; Chapter 6: Digital Image Formats; Chapter 7: Matters Concering Audio; Chapter 8: Choosing the right codec; Chapter 9: How encoders work; Chapter 10: The MPEG-1 codec; Chapter 11: The MPEG-2 Codec; Chapter 12: The MPEG-4 part 2 codec; Chapter 13: The H.264 codec; Chapter 14: Encoded output delivered as a bit stream; Chapter 15: Live Encoding; Chapter 16: Files and storage formats; Chapter 17: Tape formats; Chapter 18: Commercial issues, DRM and licensing; Chapter 19: Network delivery mechanisms; Chapter 20 Streaming; Chapter 21: Players and platforms; Chapter 22: Windows Media; chapter 23: QuickTime; Chapter 24: Real Networks; Chapter 25: Other player alternatives; Chapter 26: Putting video on the web; Chapter 27: Digital Television; Chapter 28: Digital video on the move; Chapter 29: Building your encoding hardware; Chapter 30: Setting up your encoding software; Chapter 31: Preparing to encode your video; Chapter 32: Ingesting your source content; Chapter 33: Temporal pre-processing; Chapter 34: Spatial pre-processing; Chapter 35: Colour correction; Chapter 36: Cutting out the noise; Chapter 37: Preparing the audio for encoding; Chapter 38: Encoding - Go for it!; Chapter 39: Where next?; Appendix A-M

Cliff Wootton was the technical systems architect in the BBC News Interactive TV group. This team pioneered the "News Loops" service, which was nominated for a BAFTA Technology award and has won a Royal Television Society Award for Technical Innovation. His current research projects are investigating new ways to build interactive content creation tools for the emerging IPTV platforms