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Compression for Great Video and Audio: Master Tips and Common Sense
Learn how to compress video and audio with optimal quality and minimal hassles. Renowned expert Ben Waggoner teaches you to improve the quality of your final content and develop effective workflows. Understand the basic concepts of vision and hearing, apply that knowledge in the context of compression, then move onto practical, applicable information for creating, editing, and compressing the best video and audio, whether you're delivering for the web, DVD, Blu-ray, phones, or beyond. Clear examples of how to make the best choices in real-world projects
Covers Mac and Windows products for a complete look at today's compression all the different tools, codecs, and formats for different kinds of deliverables are described, focusing on how to pick the right options for particular projects, players, and sources
Formats Windows Media QuickTime Flash FLV and F4V MPEG-4 and H.264 MPEG-2 Ogg Vorbis and Theora Silverlight and Smooth Streaming Devices iPod and iPhone Zune HD Playstation Portable Playstation 3 Xbox 360 DVD and Blu-ray
Covers Mac and Windows products for a complete look at today's compression all the different tools, codecs, and formats for different kinds of deliverables are described, focusing on how to pick the right options for particular projects, players, and sources
Formats Windows Media QuickTime Flash FLV and F4V MPEG-4 and H.264 MPEG-2 Ogg Vorbis and Theora Silverlight and Smooth Streaming Devices iPod and iPhone Zune HD Playstation Portable Playstation 3 Xbox 360 DVD and Blu-ray
616 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 2002
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 6, 2014
I bought this book by former Microsoft employee Ben Waggoner because part of my job is supporting file-based workflows at a broadcaster.
Compression was not a topic I studied during my schooling and I decided that I should seek out a text that would fill in the foundation of my knowledge on the subject.
I knew plenty about the subject already but it was inconsistent because it was limited to the formats and software that came up in my employment.
Waggoner was pretty up front about conflicts in the text, most significantly that he worked for Microsoft and was writing about technologies that they had invested in and desired to promote.
This book spends a lot of time on Windows Media and Silverlight. Not very interesting to me because we don't use either extensively at my workplace. The word Zune comes up 69 times in the text.
I knew when I bought this book that it was first published in 2009 and although the current edition is from early 2013 it doesn't seem to be updated significantly.
So the current cutting edge isn't even hinted at. There's no mention of H.265 or VP9 in text at all. An entire chapter is devoted to Flash video. Although it's noted that it is on its way out.
HTML5 is mentioned but doesn't get its own section. Android isn't mentioned at all.
This is a pretty strong demonstration of the current velocity of technological development and why books aren't the best way to learn about specific technologies any longer. They're still useful for an in depth discussion on basic concepts though and that's the focus of the first eight chapters of the book.
Waggoner covers swiftly the physics of light and sound and then moves on to how humans perceive them. As you'd expect an introduction to the digitization of those signals follows.
Sub-sampling is covered here and I found it to be an enlightening approach since the author is not coming at the subject from a traditional broadcasting background.
File-based workflows are also discussed, again without the breathlessness that you might find in text written by a traditional video pro.
The book then moves through the MPEG audio and video codecs covering popular pro and consumer formats (MPEG2 video, AAC, H.264, MP3, xvid).
There's the chapter I mentioned about Flash and FLV, Windows Media and VC-1, the Ogg formats and a chapter that would have been only marginally relevant even in 2009 on RealMedia. Some material follows on optical discs (thankfully HD-DVD was absent) and portable devices (more Zune).
There is also a section on Quicktime. Following the index is an appendix about the different software tools available. I only skimmed this.
Throughout the book Waggoner brings up the convergence he was seeing in the field towards H.264 and devices having robust hardware decoding of it. These facts mean that knowledge of the target of a encoded file has become less important in choosing what codec, container and settings to use when encoding it.
Increasingly, target devices can play anything no matter how complex. This process seems to have completed. You can encode a High-profile HD H.264 and be reasonably confident that modern hardware can decode it.
This depreciates the walkthroughs that are included in the book because many of the constraints detailed no longer exist.
This book was still valuable to read because it gave me a good overview of how video and audio compression technologies have developed over the last decade (YouTube will turn ten next year!). That sort of knowledge helps because it provides context for the features and options in the technologies that have followed.
I could not find any errata online and the author doesn't appear to not maintain a website for the title. The print copy includes a CD-ROM with software which I was not able to review because the Kindle edition doesn't provide anything as an alternative.
Compression was not a topic I studied during my schooling and I decided that I should seek out a text that would fill in the foundation of my knowledge on the subject.
I knew plenty about the subject already but it was inconsistent because it was limited to the formats and software that came up in my employment.
Waggoner was pretty up front about conflicts in the text, most significantly that he worked for Microsoft and was writing about technologies that they had invested in and desired to promote.
This book spends a lot of time on Windows Media and Silverlight. Not very interesting to me because we don't use either extensively at my workplace. The word Zune comes up 69 times in the text.
I knew when I bought this book that it was first published in 2009 and although the current edition is from early 2013 it doesn't seem to be updated significantly.
So the current cutting edge isn't even hinted at. There's no mention of H.265 or VP9 in text at all. An entire chapter is devoted to Flash video. Although it's noted that it is on its way out.
HTML5 is mentioned but doesn't get its own section. Android isn't mentioned at all.
This is a pretty strong demonstration of the current velocity of technological development and why books aren't the best way to learn about specific technologies any longer. They're still useful for an in depth discussion on basic concepts though and that's the focus of the first eight chapters of the book.
Waggoner covers swiftly the physics of light and sound and then moves on to how humans perceive them. As you'd expect an introduction to the digitization of those signals follows.
Sub-sampling is covered here and I found it to be an enlightening approach since the author is not coming at the subject from a traditional broadcasting background.
File-based workflows are also discussed, again without the breathlessness that you might find in text written by a traditional video pro.
The book then moves through the MPEG audio and video codecs covering popular pro and consumer formats (MPEG2 video, AAC, H.264, MP3, xvid).
There's the chapter I mentioned about Flash and FLV, Windows Media and VC-1, the Ogg formats and a chapter that would have been only marginally relevant even in 2009 on RealMedia. Some material follows on optical discs (thankfully HD-DVD was absent) and portable devices (more Zune).
There is also a section on Quicktime. Following the index is an appendix about the different software tools available. I only skimmed this.
Throughout the book Waggoner brings up the convergence he was seeing in the field towards H.264 and devices having robust hardware decoding of it. These facts mean that knowledge of the target of a encoded file has become less important in choosing what codec, container and settings to use when encoding it.
Increasingly, target devices can play anything no matter how complex. This process seems to have completed. You can encode a High-profile HD H.264 and be reasonably confident that modern hardware can decode it.
This depreciates the walkthroughs that are included in the book because many of the constraints detailed no longer exist.
This book was still valuable to read because it gave me a good overview of how video and audio compression technologies have developed over the last decade (YouTube will turn ten next year!). That sort of knowledge helps because it provides context for the features and options in the technologies that have followed.
I could not find any errata online and the author doesn't appear to not maintain a website for the title. The print copy includes a CD-ROM with software which I was not able to review because the Kindle edition doesn't provide anything as an alternative.
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