Save for the yeoman’s work that our little community does on the MultimediaWiki, it’s generally quite difficult to come by solid technical data on specific multimedia codecs. That even holds true for the “open” MPEG codecs which are wrapped up in NDAs and licensing fees. So I was stunned to find a thick, colorful, well-illustrated book called “MPEG-4 Jump Start” at the local public library.

I thought this looked highly promising because, while I know a lot of the general concepts surrounding image compression, I have never gotten too deep into MPEG-4 video compression for the simple reason that everyone else works on it. Thus, I don’t feel a need to.

Unfortunately, this book is not quite what I expected. I once asked the guru in passing whether or not FFmpeg supported the entire MPEG-4 spec. His terse response: “Very funny.” It turns out that MPEG-4 encompasses a huge number of features relating to sprite movement and 3D stuff that no one ever uses in practice these days. And that, my friends, is what this book was largely focused on. It may help to explain why Amazon presently lists used copies of this giant tome starting at $2.81.

There is, however, a followup volume entitled “More MPEG-4 Jump Start” (why do I get the feeling that MPEG probably has a separate committee dedicated to developing the names of these books?) that claims it will divulge more information about audio and video coding in the MPEG-4 scheme.

You can read an amusing passage about the unused body of MPEG-4 features under the “Enter the MPEG-4 behemoth” section at Deconstructing H.264/AVC.

If you think I’m obsessed with long-obsolete software and technology, I’ve got nothing on Trixter. This guy actually had a bake-off to determine which text editor performs best on an original 8088 PC. Forget vi vs. Emacs. Check out main article. Actually, vi is a contender but it didn’t fare well.

Check out Trixter’s blog for more classic hardware hacking, including information on how he is reworking his infamous 8088 Corruption PC video demo.

This is, hands-down, the most interesting math book I have ever read:

Who Is Fourier?

Over the course of 13 chapters, the book manages to progress from “1 + 1 = 2” (in fact, you can read that particular page through Amazon’s “Look Inside” facility) through fundamentals of calculus differentiation and integration (without ever using the word ‘calculus’, at least, not that I noticed), and eventually teaches the reader how to perform a fast Fourier transform (FFT) by hand on paper. All of this is done using fairly small words, humorous illustrations, and curious storytelling. Since the FFT is so widely used in audio and video compression technology, consider this book if you don’t quite understand how the transform operates. And refer to it again everytime your knowledge lapses and you forget how the transform works.

The book is published by an entity known as the Transnational College of Lex. I realized from their Amazon listing that they also have books teaching about DNA and quantum mechanics. If I had interest in either of those areas, I imagine these would be fantastic books for getting started on the subjects.

Sometimes, while using the the Xv hardware YUV interface with xine, the program briefly displays the ghost of some other image momentarily as it creates a new video window. Typically, the ghost depicts images that were recently shown in my Firefox web browser. So memory isn’t zeroed out somewhere along the line. That all makes sense.

What puzzles me is something I saw last week: I was working in Linux, rebooted into Windows and worked for a little while, then rebooted back into Linux. When I started xine, I saw an image that I had previously brought up in my web browser before I had rebooted into Windows. That image had staying power.

I realized that, though all of this, I had never actually cut power to the machine, only did warm reboots. Thus, I suspect the data was left over in an area of video RAM that Windows never had occasion to touch.