Coming September 2024: Coding Video
Professor Richardson’s 5th book, Coding Video: A Practical Guide to HEVC and Beyond provides a practical and comprehensive guide to the new landscape of video coding and video streaming. This book explains the core technologies with a wealth of practical examples and illustrations, covers key standards such as H.265/HEVC and includes an introduction to the new H.266/VVC standard.
Visit the Book Companion Site for resources and updates relating to Coding Video.
Books by Iain E. Richardson
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The H.264 Advanced Video Compression Standard
Purchase: Wiley
John Wiley & Sons 2010
H.264 Advanced Video Coding or MPEG-4 Part 10 is fundamental to a growing range of markets such as high definition broadcasting, internet video sharing, mobile video and digital surveillance. This book reflects the growing importance and implementation of H.264 video technology. Offering a detailed overview of the system, it explains the syntax, tools and features of H.264 and equips readers with practical advice on how to get the most out of the standard.
Packed with clear examples and illustrations to explain H.264 technology in an accessible and practical way.
Covers basic video coding concepts, video formats and visual quality.
Explains how to measure and optimise the performance of H.264 and how to balance bitrate, computation and video quality.
Analyses recent work on scalable and multi-view versions of H.264, case studies of H.264 codecs and new technological developments such as the popular High Profile extensions.
An invaluable companion for developers, broadcasters, system integrators, academics and students who want to master this burgeoning state-of-the-art technology.
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H.264 and MPEG-4 Video Compression
Purchase: Wiley
John Wiley & Sons 2003
Following on from the successful MPEG-2 standard, MPEG-4 Visual is enabling a new wave of multimedia applications from Internet video streaming to mobile video conferencing. The new H.264 ‘Advanced Video Coding’ standard promises impressive compression performance and is gaining support from developers and manufacturers. The first book to cover H.264 in technical detail, this unique resource takes an application-based approach to the two standards and the coding concepts that underpin them.
Presents a practical, step-by-step, guide to the MPEG-4 Visual and H.264 standards for video compression.
Introduces the basic concepts of digital video and covers essential background material required for an understanding of both standards.
Provides side-by-side performance comparisons of MPEG-4 Visual and H.264 and advice on how to approach and interpret them to ensure conformance.
Examines the way that the standards have been shaped and developed, discussing the composition and procedures of the VCEG and MPEG standardisation groups.
Focussing on compression tools and profiles for practical multimedia applications, this book ‘decodes’ the standards, enabling developers, researchers, engineers and students to rapidly get to grips with both H.264 and MPEG-4 Visual.
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Video Codec Design
Purchase: Wiley
John Wiley & Sons 2002
Video compression coding is the enabling technology behind a new wave of communication applications. From streaming internet video to broadcast digital television and digital cinema, the video codec is a key building block for a host of new multimedia applications and services. Video Codec Design sets out to de-mystify the subject of video coding and present a practical, design-based approach to this emerging field.
Guidance on the practical design and implementation of video coding technology.
Explanation of the major video coding standards, including MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.263 and H.26L.
Detailed coverage of key video coding techniques and core algorithms.
Examination of critical design issues including transmission, Quality of Service and processing platforms.
A wealth of illustrations and practical examples, including quantitative comparisons of design alternatives.
Video Codec Design provides communications engineers, system designers, researchers and technical managers with an essential handbook to image and video compression technology. The clear presentation and emphasis on real-life examples make this book an excellent teaching tool for computer science and electronic engineering instructors.
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Digital Video Communications
Purchase: Amazon
Artech House 1997
Offers an understanding of the applications and supporting technologies associated with digital video communications. The text also shows how to provide reliable, flexible and robust video transmission over networks. It begins with a discussion of the new and emerging applications of digital video communications including tele-medicine, videoconferencing and distance learning, and introduces the key systems required to support digital video: the Internet, ATM networks and Broadband ISDN. It also explores near future developments to the Internet that will support real-time video traffic.
Resources and Blog Posts
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Video compression is the technology behind moving digital images. It is essential to video on phones, cameras, laptops and TV. In fact, anything you can watch on a screen uses video compression. Digital video takes up a very large amount of storage space or bandwidth in its original, uncompressed form. Video compression makes it possible to send or store digital video in a smaller, compressed form. Source video is compressed or encoded before transmission or storage. Compressed video is decompressed or decoded before displaying it to the end user.
The resources below will help you to understand the basic concepts.
Posts:
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The first edition of the H.264 Advanced Video Coding standard was co-published in 2003 by ISO/IEC as MPEG-4 Part 10 and ITU-T as Recommendation H.264. H.264 supports efficient coding and transport of conventional, rectangular video scenes. It provides broadly similar functionality to earlier standards such as MPEG-2 Video, MPEG-4 Part 2 and H.263, but with improved compression performance and support for transmission or storage in a wide range of application scenarios.
H.264 is specified in more technical detail than earlier standards in an effort to minimise the possibility of misinterpretation and to ensure reliable compatibility between conforming encoders, decoders, and bitstreams
Certain Profiles of H.264/AVC, especially the Main and High Profiles, have become widely adopted in consumer applications such that at the time of writing, 20 years after its first publication, H.264/AVC remains the most widely used video coding standard in many application areas including streaming, storage, and broadcasting.
The ITU-T has published several versions of the standard since its first edition in 2003, with later versions adding support for scalable video coding and multi-view video coding.
Posts:
An Overview of H.264 Advanced Video Coding
H.264/AVC Inter Prediction - Methods of predicting inter-coded macroblocks in P-slices in an H.264 video compression codec.
H.264/AVC Intra Prediction - Methods of predicting intra-coded macroblocks in an H.264 video compression codec
H.264/AVC Context Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding (CABAC) - Short introduction to CABAC. Familiarity with the concept of Arithmetic Coding is assumed.
H.264/AVC Context Adaptive Variable Length Coding (CAVLC) - The Variable-Length Coding scheme is described in this document.
H.264/AVC Loop Filter - Methods of filtering reconstructed blocks in an H.264 video compression codec.
H.264 Picture Management - Introduction to the parameters and processes involved in managing coded frames within the H.264/AVC standard.
H.264 Transform and Quantization - A derivation of the forward and inverse transform and quantization processes applied to 4x4 blocks of luma and chroma samples in an H.264 codec.
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H.265 High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) was developed between 2010 and 2013 by the JCT-VC, a joint committee of ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG and was published jointly by ISO/IEC and ITU-T in 2013. H.265 was intended to be a successor to H.264, with the aim of providing better compression efficiency, exploiting the improvement in computational capability of consumer electronic devices and supporting usage cases that had emerged since the release of H.264.
The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) set up a Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) to create the new standard. HEVC is a joint publication of ISO/IEC and ITU-T, formally known as ISO/IEC 23008-2 and ITU-T Recommendation H.265.
Whilst not backwards compatible with H.264, H.265 shares some of the technical approaches of the earlier standard and extends its capabilities in a number of areas.
Posts:
HEVC: An introduction to high efficiency coding
HEVC Analysers - An overview of popular HEVC analysers including installation guides, usage and available features.
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H.266 Versatile Video Coding (VVC) was published by ISO/IEC and ITU-T in 2020. This new standard aimed to provide a better compression performance than its predecessors (including H.265/HEVC) at the expense of an increased computational cost and to add further support for emerging applications and usage scenarios.
At the time of writing (2024), chip manufacturers are beginning to announce hardware support for H.266/VVC, i.e. built-in hardware decoding that can be integrated into consumer devices. If VVC becomes popular in the market, it will gradually be added into future generations of devices along with the earlier codecs such as H.264 and H.265 and other formats such as AV1, discussed below.
Resources will be added in the future.
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