Video Gurus: Best place to learn about video encoding?
 

I am not looking for software, I am actually looking for the best place to learn more about the technical side of videos and video encoding. Formats, containers, codecs, audio, etc...

I will be coding some advanced video/tube scripts and my lack of knowledge on the technical side of videos is holding that back a bit.

Any guides, links, or tutorials would be great.

Thank you!

Maybe even a good book I can read through? Anything thats a little less boring than FFMPEG docs would be nice.

Doom9 and Digital Digest forums are where the geekiest of the video geeks call home

I am looking too!

doom9 is a good place for help with things.

wikipedia is a good place to get general overview of these technologies, which devices support which containers/codec, etc..

books i can not recommend, the technology moves so fast, most books are outdated by the time they hit the presses.

lots of time in the trenchs beating head against wall is really the only way of learning all the caveats of using the different encoding/transcoding software and getting an awesome product out of it.

CreativeCow.net as someone else said and DVInfo.net are two very good forums filled with helpful articles and people.

If you don't know that Google could help you learn everything you need to know, then you have bigger problems than learning vid encoding.:winkwink:

We have our own encoder system and I played 2 weeks full time to figure out the best setting with ffmpeg, this site has been helpful : http://www.videohelp.com/

It really depend on what you want to do, if it's simple I can give you a unix command to encode your needs, but if you're looking only for an application, handbrake will be a good one.

Glad you accomplished an extra post today, well done! You should take the day off and rest up for tomorrow big guy!

Thank you everyone, I will take a look at everything.

I appreciate it, I can already write out exec commands for ffmpeg in php, I just want to understand WTF it is all doing when or if something goes wrong on the technical side. For example, why will clip 1 generate thumbnails, but not clip2 when it's the same format, why does this source file have audio, but not when I convert it to X format, etc...

Thank you. :)