First Installment of Xiph.org's 'Digital Video Primer For Geeks' 86
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."
Nice video (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Very Informative (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Careful what you wishfor... (Score:1, Interesting)
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!
Re:Very informative and well done (Score:1, Interesting)
Monty was keynote speaker at Ohio Linuxfest earlier this month where he presented a teaser of this video. He is clearly very passionate about his work and his enthusiasm and delivery make audio and video codecs seem pretty exciting.
Re:Very informative and well done (Score:1, Interesting)
Sure, if you like "talking head" videos.
Some more graphs, equations, and animations would help... show me, don't tell me!
Re:Thanks for the videos! (Score:1, Interesting)
I can see the slashdot logo in Lynx it looks like this /.
Perhaps you need to update your version of your browser the latest version of Lynx is a modern browser that can convert images to Ascii Art - can you believe that Ascii Art!! I tell you man, Wow just WoW!
And the best feature of all is that it looks like the matrix when it is displaying animated images and videos. In fact, Neo is coming over to watch a movie with my VLC pluging for Lynx. Good times man, Good times!