arstechnica.com — It's one of the most popular and controversial file types in the world, but most explanations of its workings are either blindingly simplistic or overwhelmingly technical. Learn about the workings of MP3 without a second Ph.D. in this guide.
Oct 4, 2007 View in Crawl 4
zachska87Oct 4, 2007
I don't have my first Ph.D. yet. :(
elranzerOct 4, 2007
No Google job for you, then.
winston84Oct 4, 2007
buried as inaccurate : MP3's are data-reduced, not compressed .
antitabOct 5, 2007
Cute article, but the basic inaccuracies get it +1 bury."what it (quantization) boils down to is the process of assigning a numerical value to something"In the sense of quantizing an analog signal, yes, but this isn't the context of the quote, making their definition wrong. Which is surprising coming from a tech blog with such clout. In signal compression, quantization refers to scaling down and approximating a set of values. Usually, a frequency matrix consisting of cosine coefficients are quantized (JPEG, MPEG video and audio)."DVDs are a modified version of MPEG-2, as is your digital TV signal."I didn't realize that using a different container format = modifying the compression scheme. DVD and DVR is not modified MPEG-2 in any way. It is vanilla MPEG-2 Main Profile @ Main Level.
oldcyborgOct 6, 2007
You know, I'm just not all that bright... But this, I can understand, and appreciate somebody breaking it down for me. Thanks, from all of us mathematically impaired.Cyborg