DVD Demystified Third Edition

Book Description

U.S DVD sales will top $8.1 billion in 2002, an increase of over 50%, according to Adams Media Research. DVD sales this year surpassed video, even though only 30% of households have DVD players (compared to 90% for VCRs). In August 2002 the New York Times dubbed DVD “the most successful home entertainment device in history…a true pop-culture phenomenon.” DVD Demystified has served as DVD’s bible since the format first shipped in 1997. Demystifying not only basic technology issues but detailing production and authoring processes, making sense out of the plethora of battling video, audio, and data formats, and clearly explaining how DVD standards and specs dovetail or clash with related digital media standards, this book has not only become DVD’s standard reference, but also required reading for DVD enthusiasts who wanting to peer behind the scenes and figure out how to get the most from their technology. Since then, Jim Taylor has become DVD’s most visible guru, now President of the DVD Association, author of the internet DVD FAQ, and profiled by E!Online and DVD Report. This third edition will be almost completely rewritten to cover the major technology, format, and standard changes of the past three years, and will once again include a DVD designed to show the extreme limits of performance of this dynamic technology.

Customer Reviews:

An extraordinary book .......2007-01-16

The 5-stars rating is probably reductive for the third Dvd Demystified edition. It is the most complete work about the amazing dvd technology,
its history, the production processes and its future (or should i say: actual?) developments. For video technicians, dvd authors, graphics designers and for those who love to get a deeper knowledge about dvd world DVD demystified is like the Bible, a must-have opera which the included dvd (with examples of all the contents allowed by dvd specs) has an enormous value by itself. Purchase it with no fear: it really keeps the promises it makes.

Everything I need to know about DVD's.......2007-01-11

Bought the 2nd edition about 1 year ago and immediately bought the 3rd edition when it came out. I find everything I need to know about DVD's. The included DVD has some helpful audio and video tests.

Highly recommend this book for anyone who want's to understand the technologies behind DVD's.

DVD Demystified.......2007-01-09

This is an excellent book that caters for a wide range of knowledge bases and explains some of the technical issues very clearly. It also gives some very useful background about the development of VHS and DVD, and this also helps to understand the rationale behind the various standards.
Quite technical in places, but certainly answers most questions concerning anything to do with music and video media. Very useful for anyone working in entertainment to know some of this. A good book, I recommend it.

DVD Demystified 3rd Edition.......2007-01-05

Very comprehensive. At times repeatative, but gives a good history of the subject. I would like to see a larger and more interactive DVD supplied with the book.

Interesting.......2006-07-25

DVD Demystified is good book to understand what's the state of the art of optic storage and digital video.

Average customer rating:

Superseded
This is a technology 'review', not a technology reference.
Great Book on Fundamentals of DV
A little dated, but still useful

Video Compression Demystified
Peter Symes
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Book Description

The Complete Guide to Video Compression

Video compression is the magic behind digital TV, videoconferencing, DVDs, and Internet video. In Video Compression Demystified, specialist Peter Symes paints the full video compression picture in a friendly, not-too-big, not-too-technical introduction that explains what happens in compression, why compression works, and what will stop it from working.

You'll explore all the major compression standards--JPEG, MPEG-2, and more--starting with the basics and moving on to compression tools, performance considerations, transmission/storage quality, transport schemes, and audio considerations. You MUST read this guide if you're a Web site or multimedia developer…produce or sell video products, or are thinking of doing so…cover the entertainment, Internet, or technology beat as a reporter or financial analyst - 0r you simply want to be up to speed on this fascinating new technology of key importance to the entertainment and communications industries.

Customer Reviews:

Superseded.......2004-04-26

This book is superseded by my 2003 book "Digital Video Compression", ISBN 0071424873
Peter Symes
Author

This is a technology 'review', not a technology reference........2004-02-07

I am an engineer who purchased this book seeking low level details that described file and data formats such that I could write software which interpreted, analyzed, compressed, or displayed compressed video. This book is written for salesman and marketing people who need a high-level description of the various types of video compression and formats without going into any implementation deails. The front cover highlights on insided content is misleading. A totally useless book for engineers - save your money.

Great Book on Fundamentals of DV.......2003-12-11

I think this book is excellent and so far, the only text I have found that covers the technological fundamentals of digital video without resorting to complex mathematics. The section on the DCT transform is worth the cover price alone as it manages to explain a seriously difficult topic in simple language.

The comment in the previous review about MP3 is a little unfair in that MP3 has nothing to do with MPEG-3 at all and is in fact a subset of the MPEG-2 standard (which is covered in detail in the book). MPEG-3 was abandoned early in its development process and hence it is entirely correct that the reviewer should focus on MPEG-2 and MPEG-4.

A little dated, but still useful.......2003-12-06

This edition appears to be a slightly updated version of an earlier book published in 1998 called "Video Compression". It is reasonably well-written and contains a lot of information that seems still useful, but from the point-of-view of someone who doesn't know the field it leaves me wondering if I don't need a more up-to-date text.

For example, he mentions MPEG-3 in passing only as a failed improvement to MPEG-2 video, but isn't MPEG-3 (MP3) a wildly successful standard for audio? I get the feeling that when he wrote the book 5 years ago this wasn't something that would occur to the average reader to ask, but in 2003 it just leaves me wondering how MPEG-2, MPEG-3, and MPEG-4 are related, if at all.

Book Description

"…without doubt the definitive reference book on DVD.”*

DVD is the all-in-one storage technology that is altering the landscape of home entertainment, professional video, business communications, and multimedia computing. Now is the time to learn about DVD and how to use it to its best advantage. In DVD Demystified, Second Edition, industry insider Jim Taylor paints a full, up-to-date DVD picture with a friendly technical introduction. You MUST read it if you’re a multimedia developer, work with educational technology or industrial training, if you’re a filmmaker or musician – or simply want to understand this fascinating technology with potentially huge worldwide impact.

"This is not merely ‘a’ good book to help you make sense of DVD, it is ‘the’ book that you will return to over and over as you explore and come to understand this exciting new optical media format." -- Geoffrey Tully, Multimedia Technology Consultant; former Senior VP of Production, Divx Entertainment

“As one of the DVD industry’s leading experts, Jim Taylor covers every aspect of DVD."-- Ralph LaBarge, Managing Partner, Alpha DVD

DVD contains: Hybrid DVD-Video/DVD-ROM has samples from Broadcast DVD, Dolby, THX, DTS, Joe Kane Productions, Widescreen Review, and others, plus test images, WebDVD HTML files, spreadsheets, and more

Download Description

In DVD Demystified, Second Edition, industry insider Jim Taylor paints a full, up-to-date DVD picture with a friendly technical introduction. You MUST read it if you?re a multimedia developer, work with educational technology or industrial training, if you?re a filmmaker or musician ? or simply want to understand this fascinating technology with potentially huge worldwide impact.

Customer Reviews:

DVD inside of book.......2007-01-26

I bought this on a recommendation from another web site. While the book has alot of information in it I mainly wanted the DVD inside of the book. I have to say I was not disappointed in the book and felt it was a good thing to refer to also.

Don't Use One Word Where 20 Will Do.......2005-08-08

Don't be fooled by the size of this book. It is 90% irrelevances and padding. For example does it really need a discussion on whether the word "disk" should end with a "c" or a "k"? The diagrams are difficult to follow, mainly due to their mistakes, and I did not find enough technical information for the book to be of any use whatsoever.

awesome achievement but still..........2004-08-26

Don't get me wrong - there is a huge amount of well-written material in this book and I'm glad I bought it.

Yet.. I wanted a detailed description of how menus and player commands worked so that I'd feel comfortable authoring complex compliations with angles, timed stills, wipes, subtitles, the works. Jim spends a lot of time on this area and talks a lot about the features, but still only managed to hit the high spots. This book won't make you into an authoring expert. Dunno if there is another book that is better, or if you have to buy the specs (ha) or if you can eventually infer what you need from the right authoring software, or...

IN THE BATTLE FOR A BOOK VERSUS GOOD OLD GOOGLE..........2003-05-19

..this book may not exactly be a shining victor. Don't mean to crash the party, the book indeed does its job remarkably well and for those who prefer their information packed and printed into one huggable volume, this is perhaps the best there is.

But the first question that people like me ask is "What can I find here that I cannot find for FREE on the net?" And the answer to that is, unfortunately, not much because a lot of this info is accessible elsewhere. Even if you search for the words "DVD demystified" it turns up a whole slew of immediately relevant websites (on almost all search engines).

That said, it is a fantastic book that doesn't gloat over the merits of DVD versus older discs, or the engineering nitty gritty of the whole format. If you are looking for practical advice for getting busy with your DVD-R/W, and are lazy (or busy) enough to want a book for it, then this is great bang for your buck. For the rest of us there is always a search engine.

well written comprehensive, detailed.......2002-10-23

This book is well written, well edited, comprehensive, and as full of details as it can be without being a copy of the specifications. I highly recommend it.

Average customer rating:

Enough information to not feel like an complete idiot.
Thorough technical coverage
A Useful Overview of Interactive TV
Don't waste your time

Interactive Television Demystified

Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0071363254

Book Description

The first-ever, fact-filled introduction to the new world of interactive TV

Interactive Television Demystified helps you understand why the advent of Interactive Television will alter the broadcast industry more dramatically than even the introduction of color did decades ago. This guide by broadcasting insider Jerry Whitaker is the book to go to for the straight facts on interactive TV: what it actually is, what services are possible, and how it is affecting and will affect the television, cable, and computer industries. Packing plenty of case histories, this look at the hype-and reality of media convergence uses a proven, topic-clarifying format to bring you up to speed on PC-based receivers and other smart appliances, and provides you with:
Coverage of the ATSC and DVB standards
Interactive TV business models
Clear treatment of TV datacasting
More

Customer Reviews:

Enough information to not feel like an complete idiot........2002-04-09

Book could *definitely* do a better job of specifying which of its sections are relevant to Digital TV in general, and which are relevant to Interactive Television in specific. You do need to understand digital tv to understand the technical issues behind Interactive Television, but that should be made clear(er) by the editor.

This said, Whitaker does a good job of putting together enough information so that if you have enough media/technical background, you should be able to discuss iTV issues with some facility.

The book is divided into chapters written by separate authors, with each chapter having its own references and bibliography appended. Chapters include:

-The Promise of Interactive Television
-Video and Audio Compression
-Program and System Information Protocol
-The DVB System
-Standardization Issues
-Metadata Management
-Internet and TV Convergence
-Content Distribution
-PC-Based Receivers
-Interactive Videoconferencing

Honestly, for me the book was a little bit heavy on the digital television technical stuff and a little bit light on the possible business models and applications. Good glossary, however, and the references are also quite valuable.

Thorough technical coverage.......2002-03-13

I bought this book as someone who works in the industry and needed to sort through the various, and sometimes confusing, standards. The book does an excellent job of segmenting and explaining the technical components of interactive TV and its dependencies on digital TV. Though the book is designed to provide a broad coverage of the industry and technology, it also provides technical building-block details necessary to move beyond the books intent.

The author accomplishes his goal of removing the mystery and encourages forward thinking. The book is easy to understand and will always be on my shelf as a reference book.

A Useful Overview of Interactive TV.......2002-03-09

This book covers the technical basics upon which interactive TV is built. It is not a business-oriented look at interactive services, which are still very fluid. What it does cover, quite well, is the fundamental technologies that make interactive TV work. Considerable detail is provided on digital television, the real enabler of this technology, and the standards being developed to make it all work. I found the book a good primer on the technologies involved.

Don't waste your time.......2001-12-11

The chutzpah these guys have. This book has nothing whatsoever to do with interactive TV. It's a technical overview of Digital TV (all the boring technical detail about standards, compression etc that is freely available on the web). They don't even mention a word about middleware providers(Open TV, Liberate etc); they don't deal at all with the business/marketing or media issues related to ITV. If u are looking fo information about interactive TV, look elsewhere. I feel ripped off and (angry).

Average customer rating:

Videoconferencing Demystified
Steven Shepard
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill Professional
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0071400850

Average customer rating:

4th edition better
My Video Bible
A good reference
Video Remystified
A good book for video electronics engineers

Video Demystified, 3rd Edition
Keith Jack
Manufacturer: Newnes
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Science | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 1878707566

Book Description

Master video system design with the NEW THIRD EDITION of this essential reference! This book is the "bible" for digital video hardware engineers and programmers worldwide, as it contains detailed video information difficult to find elsewhere. The third edition has been completely updated with new chapters on analog and digital video interfaces, H.261 and H.263, consumer DV, and DTV. This is by far the most informative analog and digital video reference available. If you work with video, you need this reference on your shelf!

Keith Jack has designed more than 25 video and multimedia integrated circuits for such companies as Brooktree and Harris Corporation. He was the designer of the world's first single-chip NTSC/PAL digital encoder/decoder and holds two video processing patents. He is currently director of product marketing for Sigma Designs.

* Provides international coverage by including European, Asian, and North/South American video standards, methods, and techniques

* Contains expanded coverage of digital video processing technologies, video compression, digital video interfaces, and the MPEG1 and MPEG2 standards

* Includes two CDs which provide video test files for MPEG1, MPEG2, H261, and H263 and an electronic version of the book

Download Description

This is by far the most definitive, informative video reference available, made more compelling by the author's inclusion of the hottest new trends and cutting-edge developments in the field. Finding another single-volume source for the huge amount of information in this book is impossible. Professionals in this rapidly changing field will need the new edition of this book to keep up with the latest technology developments and industry standards. With the major worldwide push to switch to digital broadcasting, adoption of new technology standards and protocols take place at a rapid pace and no-one can afford to be left behind. This means that over the next few years, utilization of digital video in broadcast, internet and other medai will skyrocket. This book will serve as an invaluable guide to the designers and engineers who will design, create, and deliver these products and services.

Customer Reviews:

4th edition better.......2007-05-18

I quickly scanned the text. The difference between the fifth edition and the fourth edition is that the 5th is missing the CD with the electronic version of the book.

My Video Bible.......2007-02-03

As a EE specializing in hardware development often related to video processing, I consider this my "Video Bible".

A good reference.......2006-06-30

This book serves as a very good reference for video engineers. However, for a person new to the field of video encoding/decoding, I would not recommend this book.

Video Remystified.......2006-06-28

This is supposed to be the Bible on all things video, but
the book falls short in many areas:

- Each successive edition has compressed old material and
added new material to the point where the coverage in
many areas is extremely superficial. Introductory material
has been hacked out.
- Terms are introduced and either not explained at all, or
explained pages later. A good editor should have read this
thing. It reads like it was pasted together.
- If the author broke the book into multiple volumes, the
book would benefit. I'd suggest one for digital standards,
and one for everything else (interface standards, video
basics, etc.). Then increase the total page count to restore
material trimmed out from previous additions.
- There are way too many useless, redundant pictures. Could have
used one picture along with a table to each resolution.

A good book for video electronics engineers.......2006-06-03

To begin with, the 4th edition of this book was released in autumn 2004, so all reviews earlier than that are referring to previous editions. I think that too many people buy this book and are expecting either "Video Algorithms Demystified" or "Video Processing Demystified". That is entirely understandable since "Video Demystified" could be talking about one or several areas of video and until you purchase the book you don't really know which one. This book should probably be relabeled as "Video Systems Demystified" to cause a minimum of confusion.

This book is most suitable for electrical engineers that are interested in video signals and their diagrams, video interfaces, connectors and their pin-outs, voltage levels, and digital data and video formats. There are many diagrams showing, for example, typical scrambler and descrambler circuits. The chapters on the video standards (MPEG-1,2,4) do a pretty good job of detailing the format of the video data as it is encoded, including all of the possible header fields, but there is virtually no discussion on any of the compression and motion estimation algorithms that do the actual encoding. There is one chapter on video signal processing, and it is very superficial.

The CD-ROM contains a large variety of color test images useful to video engineers trying to determine if their video system has any problems, and if so, produce a diagnosis. The one item in this book of particular interest to people with more of a computer science/algorithm interest in video would be the source code for MPEG-1, MPEG-2, H.261, and H.263 video encoders and decoders present on the CD. However, I have not tried out these decoders myself, so I cannot speak to their functionality.

In summary, if you are an electrical/electronics engineer involved in video electronics I highly recommend this book. If you are a programmer or someone interested in the algorithms of video processing, this book will probably be only moderately (3 stars) helpful. Thus, I split the difference for a 4 star rating. I notice that Amazon only shows the content for the 3rd edition, so I show the table of contents for the 4th edition next:
Introduction 1
Introduction to Video 6
Color Spaces 15
Video Signals Overview 35
Analog Video Interfaces 66
Digital Video Interfaces 100
Digital Video Processing 202
NTSC/PAL/SECAM Overview 265
NTSC and PAL Digital Encoding and Decoding 394
H.261 and H.263 472
Consumer DV 519
MPEG-1 Video Compression 543
MPEG-2 Video Compression 581
MPEG-4 and H.264 736
ATSC Digital Television 760
OpenCable Digital Television 778
DVB Digital Television 796
ISDB Digital Television 816
IPTV 831
Glossary 841

Average customer rating:

Interactive Television Demystified
Jerry Whitaker
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OFMIUQ

Average customer rating:

MPEG-4 Demystified
Peter D. Symes
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Book Description

The MPEG-4 video compression standard will finally make video over the internet technologically and financially feasible--and here's the book that shows readers how to use the standard to compress and stream their own material.

Following the popular DEMYSTIFIED SERIES format, the book addresses the standard in terms of functionality: what can the standard do and how do you use it to get what you need.

* Annotates the MPEG-4 standard in plain English
* Includes CD-ROM with an MPEG encoder with 30-second video samples, ready-to-use compression algorithms, video stills, color images, and high-resolution images
* How-to projects, and a full trouble-shooting program
* Covers video and audio coding for MPEG-4
* Discusses compression and delivery for ITV and DTV

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