MPEG Video: Compression Standard

A great book to have! MPEG-2 experts like Chad always provide more real stuffs than some later folks, who might only think to be some "chair"

This book is really divided into three parts. Each subsection of each chapter features a difficulty rating that is particularly helpful. A circle is present at the start of each chapter subsection, and it is filled proportional to the difficulty of the material. The first part of the book is chapters one through five which have a very general overview of video compression principles used in MPEG. This section is rather shallow, and if you want a deep treatment of this subject matter you would be well advised to look elsewhere. The second part of the book consists of chapters six through fifteen, and is the outline of the MPEG-1 video compression standard in detail. This section is very good, since it explains at a bit and byte level everything in a MPEG-1 data stream. In fact, MPEG-1 was described in such detail that I was actually able to design a working MPEG-1 decoder using the information from this book. Chapters nine and ten describe the MPEG-2 video data format, but not in such detail as MPEG-1 is discussed in this book. This is because this book series has a separate volume devoted to the MPEG-2 standard. The final section of this book, chapters 16 through 19, is just an overview of MPEG patents, history, and vendors, and by the time I am writing this review, section three is quite obsolete. MPEG-1 is intended for data rates on the order of 1.5 Mbits per second, which is still adequate for some users. Thus, even nine years after its publication this book is still a worthy read if you are seeking to understand MPEG-1 or code an MPEG-1 video decoder.

This is a great book to learn the mpeg1 format from. With its help you can confidently write a mpeg1 decoder. I have not read the official spec, but I found the descriptions given in the book quite lucid, in spite of the fact that I started to read this book without any video compression background. However, this is not a book on video compression in general. Surely a book on THAT topic would not have a title bearing the words "mpeg" and "standard". I have some experience in reading file format standards, and I only wish every file format standard would have such a nice book to explain it!The book even covers fundamentals like DCT and Huffman coding (as much as is needed in this book). It has entire chapters on motion estimation and motion compensation. I like the way the book starts off with a general informative overview, rather than as a typical "standards manual" starting with a list of notations and fonts to be used.The pseudo codes given in the book are taken from the original spec (with due references). These are explained with flowcharts. If you are trying to learn video compression in general, then this is not the book for you. There are plenty of books on that topic. This book serves a much more esoteric purpose of elucidating the gory details of one of the most important video file formats, and it fulfils this purpose with complete applomb!

This book gave me the knowledge required to understand the syntax of MPEG1 sytem and video streams as well as understand the compression algorithms utilized.As a Digital Video Specialist, I still refer to this book four years after buying it.

Unlike some of the other reviewers, I found this book to be a great resource! The MPEG-1 codec is covered in some depth, including syntax. Other topics like MPEG-2 and rate control are also touched on. What this book (and most others on the topic) is missing, is an in-depth discussion on motion estimation techniques. The Kluwer book on motion estimation by Borko Furht will fill in some of the blanks, but is too expensive for what you get. All in all, I think this book is suited for someone wanting to impliment or understand an implimentation of the codec. It is not so much for the person looking for theory on video compression. The book, "Video Compression", by Peter Symes is a great one for that !