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First Amazon book review is out from technologist Douglas Dixon, who blogs at the Manifest Tech Blog. I love the title of the review, Ozer Transforms Video Compression from Alchemy to Science, because it captures exactly what I tried to do in the book. Here’s a snippet from the middle of the review.
First, Ozer covers the basics of video compression and associated tools. He does not just provide advice, he backs it up by discussing the results of his extensive testing of compassion tools and options with real-world videos. This work is based on his background in video shooting and production, in reviewing and testing video tools, in consulting to build real-world solutions for compression pipelines, and then sharing his discoveries — in articles, talks, on his Streaming Learning Center website, and in his books.
Then, to package up the compression process, Ozer demonstrates how to use the free cross-platform FFmpeg tool to perform batch compression, providing example scripts with each technical chapter, again tempered with discussions of his experience in experimenting with the various options.
And most importantly, Ozer grounds the compression process in science by applying objective quality metrics that analyze the video and report its visual quality. This is a huge advance driven by new metrics and tools, moving from simple PSNR to newer metrics including VQM and SSIM. Now you no longer need to sit and watch each compressed video you produce in order to check them (which obviously becomes impossible with multiple output formats and resolutions). Instead, Ozer shows how to use these tools to look for anomalies, and then focus in on the trouble spots.
Doug is a colleague, and has reviewed my last three compression-related books. I appreciate that he takes the time to read the book, assess its usefulness, form his own conclusions, and write a cohesive review. I think you’ll find his thoughts helpful and worth a look.
Buy the book on Amazon ($49.95).
(Note that a service called SendOwl will handle processing and delivery via PayPal. I know it's a leap of faith to use a new vendor, but I've delivered dozens of books with the service without any problems or complaints. If you try the service, and have a bad experience, please let me know at jozer@mindspring.com)
