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Title: Video Demystified, 3rd Edition by Keith Jack ISBN: 1-878707-56-6 Publisher: LLH Publications Pub. Date: 15 March, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $69.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.43 (7 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Good book for learning, do not use as a reference
Comment: This book is a good introduction to NTSC / PAL / SECAM / digital video. The information on MPEG is superficial at best, but that is not what this book is about anyway. Expect a challenging read if you are new to this field.
This book is mainly aimed at the hardware developer. If this is you, do not base your design strictly on information in this book without reading the relevant standards documents: this contributed to the company I work for having had to spin a few chips. This book is NOT suitable as a reference.
If you're a software / driver developer, you're probably better off reading "Digital Video and HDTV" by Charles Poynton (ISBN: 1558607927). The information there will be a lot more relevant (and useful) to you. After that, you'll have a much easier time reading "Video Demystified" (if you really, really want to find out what planet the hardware designers you work with are from).
Rating: 1
Summary: a book with LOTS OF ERRORS
Comment: This is a book for people who do NOT work on designing video devices. If you want to build something based on this book, your design will most likely fail since there are many ERRORS in the book. BUT if you want to FOOL your boss on some paper design or FOOL some employers to get a JOB, this is a book for you since it is easy to read and you don't need any knowledge beyond high school.
Rating: 3
Summary: Everything you never wanted to know about video signals
Comment: If you ever wanted to be the guy in your neighborhood that knows the most about Analog and Digital video signals, then this is the book for you. I must have read the words RGB and YCrCb 100 times by page 500. And I now can tell you anything you want to know about how my VGA plug works, not to mention feeling very confident that I now understand my S-video cable on my Camcorder. If I ever travel overseas, I also have a very good grasp of the difference between "my TV signal" and "their TV signal".
Video Demystified is a good name for this text, because when you are done reading this book, you won't have any questions about anything relating to video. You'll clearly understand everything about your TV set also. How the contrast control works; how the picture is drawn on the screen; what the signals running through the cables look like, etc. And I don't just mean know them... I mean "know them". And if you feel like you need to suddenly need to build a TV set from spare parts at Radio Shack, you certainly will want to order this book and have it handy.
But I have to say, be prepared for a headache by page 300. This book isn't light reading and after a while it becomes rather redundant in areas. It's almost more of a reference manual in some ways actually.
Additionally, be warned that the author jumps right into things head first assuming you already know quite a bit about the basics of video signals already. There's no warm and fuzzy "get you up to speed" intro section in this book, so you better have a clear understanding of video signals and hardware (not to mention some background in bitmap images) before you start. When I first picked up this book to start reading it, I got a good idea of how my little sister must have felt when she realized she had accidently taken my HP 16C calculator (instead of a normal calculator) to school to help her on her math exam in 9th grade :-)
So when it comes to this book, either you are in or you are out. A lot of the text discusses specifics of different video standards - almost to the point of putting you into a coma. In other cases, when the book could have used very simple diagrams or analogies, things are diagramed out using hardware related logic diagrams. Great for someone that is use to dealing with A-to-D converters, but I pity the fool that tries to read this book for information on how to put streaming video on his website :-)
In my view, this book is best targeted to those who want to build video signal interpretation hardware devices and/or those who are working with hardware and need to understand the very root level signals involved in handling and representing video. The text also has some limited application in understanding lower level video conversion principles (such as a reference for writing RGB --> YCC algorithms) but not too much. Best for how Analog signals are turned into Digital signals really. But again, unless you are really looking to understand how chips in your CRT or Television are working, then I'd be a little careful with this book.
Not a book for the non-technical, hardware-faint-of-heart types nor for those on a quest to better understand how video compression on the internet or RealPlayer7 works. But outstanding if you suddenly need to understand what a video signal goes through to produce a video image.
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Title: Video Compression Demystified by Peter D. Symes ISBN: 0071363246 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Professional Pub. Date: 20 December, 2000 List Price(USD): $49.95 |
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Title: Digital Video and HDTV Algorithms and Interfaces by Charles Poynton ISBN: 1558607927 Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Pub. Date: January, 2003 List Price(USD): $59.94 |
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Title: Video Engineering by Arch C. Luther, Andrew F. Inglis ISBN: 0071350179 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Professional Pub. Date: 06 August, 1999 List Price(USD): $70.00 |
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Title: DVD Demystified by Jim Taylor ISBN: 0071350268 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Professional Pub. Date: 22 December, 2000 List Price(USD): $49.95 |
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Title: Video Codec Design: Developing Image and Video Compression Systems by Iain Richardson ISBN: 0471485535 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 13 May, 2002 List Price(USD): $95.00 |
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