Xiph.Org announces its first documentary video production: "A Digital Media Primer for Geeks"
"A Digital Media Primer For Geeks" (http://video.xiph.org/) is the first video from Xiph.Org, presenting the technical foundations of modern digital media via a half-hour firehose of information. Christopher "Monty" Montgomery, Red Hat engineer and founder of the Xiph.Org project, guides this tour through the foundations of digital video. The program offers a brief history of digital media, a quick summary of the sampling theorem, and myriad details of low-level audio and video characterization and formatting. It's intended for budding geeks looking to get into video coding, as well as the technically curious who want to know more about the media they wrangle for work or play. The video features a wiki companion site with transcripts, discussion, and further reading.
"Open Source has conquered and filled much of the original territory to which it aspired, but the media frontier, especially video, is still wide open and unexplored," Montgomery says. "Camera and computer costs have come down to the point where hackers on modest budgets can afford to participate." Members of the digital video community have called it "[the] Uni lecture I never got but really wanted" and "Carl Sagan on speed." The video is released under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA license for free redistribution and reuse, and was created entirely using free and open source software.
The Xiph.Org Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to open, unencumbered multimedia technology. Xiph's formats and software level the playing field for digital media so that all producers and artists can distribute their work for minimal cost, without restriction, regardless of affiliation. May contain traces of nuts.