Compression for Great Video and Audio, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 2 Uncompressed Video and Audio:Sampling and Quantization

This chapter is about how we turn light and sound into numbers. Put that way, it sounds simple, but there are a fair amount of technical details and even math-with-exponents to follow. Although it may seem that all the action happens in the codecs, a whole lot of the knowledge and assumptions about human seeing and hearing we talked about in the last chapter get baked into uncompressed video and audio well before it hits a codec.

Sampling and Quantization

In the real world, light and sound exist as continuous analog values. Those values in visual terms make up an effectively infinite number of colors and details; in audio terms, they represent an effectively infinite range of amplitude ...