Streaming Video Technical Links

Here are some links to other sites useful to technical work in streaming video. The obvious "click here to get Real Video 9" links aren't here - but more technical or fundamental ones are.

Virtual Dub - A freeware AVI editor, capture tool, and image processor famous in the PC video enthusiast community. It's one of very few programs to simulate interlaced display on a progressive (like you are using now) monitor. Go to Options | Preview field mode|Field order B for 525-line signals, then press F5 to view. Also includes an AVI file structure hex editor to see what's in an AVI file.

M4IF - The MPEG-4 Industry Forum offers an excellent site with the most current selected MPEG-4 news, a list of MPEG-4 vendors, a calendar of MPEG-4 courses and events, and links to Tutorials, FAQs, and standards documents.

VQEG - The Video Quality Experts Group is an effort to study quantitative tools for evaluating video coding or transmission impairments. So far, their conclusion is that a R-500 viewing jury is still the best measurement tool. They do have a good collection of test sequences that are useful for codec testing.

Tektronix Bitstreams - MPEG-2 bitstreams of standard test sequences, tones, and a few of the Sarnoff compliance tests.

Video Test Sequences traditionally used in testing codecs can be found at the VQEG ftp site in D1 resolution and at Dave Singer's site in QuickTime for CIF resolution.

The Almost Definitive FOURCC Definition List - Explains the four-character codes used to identify data formats in an AVI file.

John McGowan's AVI Overview - Explains the AVI file format.

HuffYUV - This is a lossless Video for Windows codec that will compress a file 2-3x. This is very useful for capturing analog video with a TV-tuner or video grabber card, as it will reduce the bitrate to within the range of a typical IDE disk, instead of requiring a RAID array.

Visual MPEG - An educational tool that shows the components of an MPEG-1 stream - motion vectors, DCT coefficients, VBV level as a visual presentation

MPEG-2 Bitrate Viewer - Shows the instantaneous bitrate of an MPEG-2 stream.

MPEG-2 Encoders - Three MPEG-2 encoders that we have used for comparison tests are: TMPGEnc, CinemaCraft, and Ligos.

Charles Poynton - A industry expert in gamma, color space, and relating the film, print, graphics, and video worlds to each other. Useful information on gamma and color space conversion (transcoding).

Email your complaints, comments, or suggestions on these links to

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