TV Tech Books: "Video Demystified" & "Digital Video and HDTV Algorithms

[jtbell]

Thanks to a recently resuscitated thread on "software NTSC decoding" I've found out about Keith Jack's "Video Demystified" book. I've gotten interested interested in TV technology lately as a result of switching from broadcast analog (NTSC) to digital (ATSC) TV and HDTV.

I looked up "Video Demystified" on amazon.com, and they offer to bundle it with Poynton's "Digital Video and HDTV Algorithms and Interfaces". Has anybody used this book, or can suggest others along these lines?

I might try writing some programs to play around with this stuff, so I'm definitely interested in technical details.

 

[chroot]

Poynton's book was really not all that interesting to me. It seemed mostly to be a book about the 100 million different competing HDTV standards, and seemed better suited as a reference than as a book to learn from.

In my opinion, Jack's book is really all you need for a very thorough introduction to analog and digital video. It's not exceedingly formal, is rather conversational, and is very broad.

Keep in mind that Jack's book does not really discuss software per se; it discusses digital algorithms. Jack often presents them as they would be implemented in hardware, though it should not be too much of a stretch to imagine implementing them in software.

You might even want to consider learning Verilog and using one of the free Verilog simulators (like cver) to simulate the digital hardware structures discussed in Jack's book, rather than translating them into a software paradigm.

- Warren