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Rating: 
Summary: a very poorly written book
Review: Authors apparently don't know what to do with the space. This book is full of constant digressions into totally irrelevant subjects and surveys of papers published since 1960s, which have nothing to do with the MPEG standard. If the authors understood the subject, it would be interesting to hear about the colorspaces, etc., but right now the book sounds like an overview of papers and books that the authors have read. Expect 4-5 references to papers per page in chapter 4. If I wanted to read all those papers I would subscribe to IEEE. And even the summaries don't make sense most of time. In the first 70 pages it didn't seem that there was a single original explanation, chart or formula. Overall: poor writing skills, lack of demonstrable knowledge, 90% of the book is made of summaries and quotes from other places. Paper quality, not a book quality. Not worth $$$.
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Summary: This seems like a watered down version of the official specs
Review: If you have read and understood the MPEG video specs, and cannot remember a few things, this may be a good reference for some key sections. This book seems to me is like a compilation of excerpts of the official specs, so it's not exactly easy to follow. I would not recommend this book as an introduction to understanding digital video or MPEG, there are books out there that explains things better.
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Summary: Reviews of this book
Review: The following reviews have appeared: "Ideal for an implementor to read in conjunction with the standards document, in which the code is not accompanied by comments...quite suitable for a text in video compression." - IEEE Spectrum, September 1997 "If you had a long airplane trip and wanted to learn about MPEG video, this book should be in your carry-on luggage. The book authors are experts in standardization efforts...the book itself is very well done." - Journal of Electronic Imaging, April 1997 Other titles in the series include:
Data Compression in Digital Systems by Hoffman (0412085518)
JPEG by Pennebaker and Mitchell (0442012721)
Digital Video by Haskell, Puri and Netravali (0412084112)
Rating: 
Summary: I disagree with the bad reviews
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A must have!
Review: This book is for you if you're the CTO of a start-up MPEG company in the Silicon Valley!
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Summary: Programmer's viewpoint
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: A great book, but not the only one you will need.
Review: 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 !
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