Resources
Communities
Discord
Despite being proprietary, Discord is a great place to talk to like-minded people. Here are a few Discord communities – they will be focused on AV1, but you can have great conversations about anything multimedia there.
- AV1 for dummies. The official server for the codec wiki. Small and new. I’m active here.
- AV1 Community. The largest AV1 Discord community, but I find the atmosphere unpleasant.
- The AV1 EX dev hub. Split from AV1 Community, probably the second largest one.
- AV1 weeb edition. This is the community of the AV1 “unofficial content distribution” scene.
- JPEG XL is the inofficial Discord community for the JPEG XL image codec.
- Jaded Encoding Thaumaturgy (JET). JET focuses on appealing anime encoding.
- VapourSynth is the official Discord community for the VapourSynth programmatic video editor. It’s often used for filtering to remove artifacts.
- VVC is the Discord community for Versatile Video Coding.
- Av1an is the official Discord community for the Av1an encoding toolkit.
- AWCY: Are We Compressed Yet?
Wikis
- The codec wiki (info on many codec-related programs and standards)
- MultimediaWiki (not technically a wiki, since it’s read-only)
Blogs
- Kostya’s boring codec world (frequent posts on multimedia reversing)
- Breaking eggs and making omelettes (infrequent posts on multimedia reversing)
- Niklas Haas’ blog (very infrequent posts on multimedia)
Articles
Introductions
- A digital media primer for geeks, watch this to learn what digital media is!
- Digital show and tell (more in-depth on sampling)
- Introduction to video coding
AV1
General
- Falsehoods programmers believe about [video stuff]
- comp.compression FAQ [1] [2] [3]
Encoding
- Soichiro’s encoding guide describes a ton of stuff around encoding in useful ways.
- JET encoding guide
- The fansubbing guide gives you some background knowledge for encoding anime.
Resampling
- ImageWorsenser has many pages on resampling. They’re great!
- on the theory of the Spline16/36/64 resizers - Doom9’s Forum
- The Magic Kernel (no consensus on accuracy, but seems good)
Motion estimation
Color
- The hitchhiker’s guide to digital color gives a good overview of color.
- RGB/XYZ matrices tells you how to convert between any color space and CIE XYZ.
- Completely painless programmer’s guide to XYZ, RGB, ICC, xyY, and TRCs
- The luminance of an sRGB color, among other things, answers the question of “Why is there a Y channel in the xyY components of some primaries, but not others?”
- History of the very odd sRGB color space
- Cone fundamentals & the LMS color space
Neural compression and machine learning enhancement
Specific coding technologies
- Atkinson Dithering
- The constrained directional enhancement filter
- Linearly constrained generalized Lloyd algorithm for reduced codebook vector quantization describes an algorithm to do what S3TC does.
- Theora spec
- Notes on the implementation of trellis quantization in H.264
- Applying perceptual vector quantization outside of Daala
- Technical articles on the PNG file format and the related compression technologies