[BoW] r13 - in trunk: book_of_wisdom.tex introduction/audience.tex introduction/motivation.tex

[attila]

Author: attila
Date: Sun Oct  5 21:00:33 2008
New Revision: 13

Log:
First version of an explanation of the motivation and target audience



Added:
   trunk/introduction/audience.tex   (contents, props changed)
   trunk/introduction/motivation.tex
Modified:
   trunk/book_of_wisdom.tex

Modified: trunk/book_of_wisdom.tex
==============================================================================
--- trunk/book_of_wisdom.tex	(original)
+++ trunk/book_of_wisdom.tex	Sun Oct  5 21:00:33 2008
@@ -16,7 +16,10 @@
  \maketitle
  \tableofcontents
 
+ \cleardoublepage
  %\input{preface.tex}
+ \input{introduction/motivation.tex}
+ \input{introduction/audience.text}
 
 
 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

Added: trunk/introduction/audience.tex
==============================================================================
--- (empty file)
+++ trunk/introduction/audience.tex	Sun Oct  5 21:00:33 2008
@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
+\section{Target audience and expected prior knowledge}
+ The audience of this book are people who want to learn about video coding
+ and how it is done in detail.
+ Programmers who want to write or help writing video players and encoders.
+ This book is not meant as an encoding guide, although most of the information
+ for such a guide will be available, but spread out over the whole book
+ and hidden in the details.
+
+ The reader should have knowledge of basic mathematics and calculus,
+ such as trigonometric functions, sums, products, differentiation and
+ integration.
+ Basic signal theoretical knowledge, such as Fourier transformation
+ and Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, is required for a few of the chapters.
+ The reader should posses a profound understanding of programming
+ in general, a good understanding of low level optimisations of
+ code and not fear the use of assembly.
+
+

Added: trunk/introduction/motivation.tex
==============================================================================
--- (empty file)
+++ trunk/introduction/motivation.tex	Sun Oct  5 21:00:33 2008
@@ -0,0 +1,30 @@
+\section{Motivation}
+ Video coding, the compression and storing of video data, started in the 90s
+ as something special.
+ Only very few people could do it, due to the lack of available programs
+ and its use was very specialised to short clips in games and special
+ effects in movies.
+ These days anybody can play, and more importantly create video files
+ in a quality and ways that was unconceivable even a few years back.
+ Video coding, which is the corner stone of digital video is now ubiquitous,
+ everything that has a display has to be able to play videos, and may it
+ be something as small as your cellular phone.
+ Digital video has even replaced analog TV system that was practically
+ unchanged for 40 years!
+
+ Although video coding became more and more important over the last
+ ten, five teen years, it got relatively few attention in general.
+ There are very few good introductory books available, and even those
+ cover only the very basics without mentioning the real world problems.
+ Academia, in other fields a great source for information, took of
+ into unknown heights, publishing a lot of papers on the state of the
+ art and not so state of the art video coding techniques.
+ Unfortunately, all of these papers require a lot of prior knowledge
+ and skills in video coding to understand them.
+
+ This lack of documentation and the ever increasing complexity
+ of video systems made it harder and harder for newcomers
+ to enter the interesting field of video coding.
+ Thus the FFmpeg's and MPlayer's teams set out to write a book
+ that starts from the basics and explains what encoders and players
+ do, up to the problems that certain ways of doing things lead.