Intro

A gentle introduction to video technology, although it's aimed at software developers / engineers, we want to make it easy for anyone to learn. This idea was born during a mini workshop for newcomers to video technology.

The goal is to introduce some digital video concepts with a simple vocabulary, lots of visual elements and practical examples when possible, and make this knowledge available everywhere. Please, feel free to send corrections, suggestions and improve it.

There will be hands-on sections which require you to have docker installed and this repository cloned.

git clone https://github.com/leandromoreira/digital_video_introduction.git
cd digital_video_introduction
./setup.sh

WARNING: when you see a ./s/ffmpeg or ./s/mediainfo command, it means we're running a containerized version of that program, which already includes all the needed requirements.

All the hands-on should be performed from the folder you cloned this repository. For the jupyter examples you must start the server ./s/start_jupyter.sh and copy the URL and use it in your browser.

Changelog

added DRM system
released version 1.0.0
added simplified Chinese translation
added FFmpeg oscilloscope filter example
added Brazilian Portuguese translation
added Spanish translation

Index

Intro
Index
Basic terminology
Redundancy removal
How does a video codec work?
Online streaming
How to use jupyter
Conferences
References

Basic terminology

An image can be thought of as a 2D matrix. If we think about colors, we can extrapolate this idea seeing this image as a 3D matrix where the additional dimensions are used to provide color data.

If we chose to represent these colors using the primary colors (red, green and blue), we define three planes: the first one for red, the second for green, and the last one for the blue color.

an image is a 3d matrix RGB

We'll call each point in this matrix a pixel (picture element). One pixel represents the intensity (usually a numeric value) of a given color. For example, a red pixel means 0 of green, 0 of blue and maximum of red. The pink color pixel can be formed with a combination of the three colors. Using a representative numeric range from 0 to 255, the pink pixel is defined by Red=255, Green=192 and Blue=203.

Other ways to encode a color image

Many other possible models may be used to represent the colors that make up an image. We could, for instance, use an indexed palette where we'd only need a single byte to represent each pixel instead of the 3 needed when using the RGB model. In such a model we could use a 2D matrix instead of a 3D matrix to represent our color, this would save on memory but yield fewer color options.

For instance, look at the picture down below. The first face is fully colored. The others are the red, green, and blue planes (shown as gray tones).

RGB channels intensity

We can see that the red color will be the one that contributes more (the brightest parts in the second face) to the final color while the blue color contribution can be mostly only seen in Mario's eyes (last face) and part of his clothes, see how all planes contribute less (darkest parts) to the Mario's mustache.

And each color intensity requires a certain amount of bits, this quantity is known as bit depth. Let's say we spend 8 bits (accepting values from 0 to 255) per color (plane), therefore we have a color depth of 24 bits (8 bits * 3 planes R/G/B), and we can also infer that we could use 2 to the power of 24 different colors.

It's great to learn how an image is captured from the world to the bits.

Another property of an image is the resolution, which is the number of pixels in one dimension. It is often presented as width × height, for example, the 4×4 image below.

image resolution

Hands-on: play around with image and color

You can play around with image and colors using jupyter (python, numpy, matplotlib and etc).

You can also learn how image filters (edge detection, sharpen, blur...) work.

Another property we can see while working with images or video is the aspect ratio which simply describes the proportional relationship between width and height of an image or pixel.

When people says this movie or picture is 16x9 they usually are referring to the Display Aspect Ratio (DAR), however we also can have different shapes of individual pixels, we call this Pixel Aspect Ratio (PAR).

display aspect ratio

pixel aspect ratio

DVD is DAR 4:3

Although the real resolution of a DVD is 704x480 it still keeps a 4:3 aspect ratio because it has a PAR of 10:11 (704x10/480x11)

Finally, we can define a video as a succession of n frames in time which can be seen as another dimension, n is the frame rate or frames per second (FPS).

video

The number of bits per second needed to show a video is its bit rate.

bit rate = width * height * bit depth * frames per second

For example, a video with 30 frames per second, 24 bits per pixel, resolution of 480x240 will need 82,944,000 bits per second or 82.944 Mbps (30x480x240x24) if we don't employ any kind of compression.

When the bit rate is nearly constant it's called constant bit rate (CBR) but it also can vary then called variable bit rate (VBR).

This graph shows a constrained VBR which doesn't spend too many bits while the frame is black.

In the early days, engineers came up with a technique for doubling the perceived frame rate of a video display without consuming extra bandwidth. This technique is known as interlaced video; it basically sends half of the screen in 1 "frame" and the other half in the next "frame".

Today screens render mostly using progressive scan technique. Progressive is a way of displaying, storing, or transmitting moving images in which all the lines of each frame are drawn in sequence.

interlaced vs progressive

Now we have an idea about how an image is represented digitally, how its colors are arranged, how many bits per second do we spend to show a video, if it's constant (CBR) or variable (VBR), with a given resolution using a given frame rate and many other terms such as interlaced, PAR and others.

Hands-on: Check video properties

You can check most of the explained properties with ffmpeg or mediainfo.

Redundancy removal

We learned that it's not feasible to use video without any compression; a single one hour video at 720p resolution with 30fps would require 278GB*. Since using solely lossless data compression algorithms like DEFLATE (used in PKZIP, Gzip, and PNG), won't decrease the required bandwidth sufficiently we need to find other ways to compress the video.

* We found this number by multiplying 1280 x 720 x 24 x 30 x 3600 (width, height, bits per pixel, fps and time in seconds)

In order to do this, we can exploit how our vision works. We're better at distinguishing brightness than colors, the repetitions in time, a video contains a lot of images with few changes, and the repetitions within the image, each frame also contains many areas using the same or similar color.

Colors, Luminance and our eyes

Our eyes are more sensitive to brightness than colors, you can test it for yourself, look at this picture.

luminance vs color

If you are unable to see that the colors of the squares A and B are identical on the left side, that's fine, it's our brain playing tricks on us to pay more attention to light and dark than color. There is a connector, with the same color, on the right side so we (our brain) can easily spot that in fact, they're the same color.

Simplistic explanation of how our eyes work The eye is a complex organ, it is composed of many parts but we are mostly interested in the cones and rods cells. The eye contains about 120 million rod cells and 6 million cone cells.

To oversimplify, let's try to put colors and brightness in the eye's parts function. The rod cells are mostly responsible for brightness while the cone cells are responsible for color, there are three types of cones, each with different pigment, namely: S-cones (Blue), M-cones (Green) and L-cones (Red).

Since we have many more rod cells (brightness) than cone cells (color), one can infer that we are more capable of distinguishing dark and light than colors.

Contrast sensitivity functions

Researchers of experimental psychology and many other fields have developed many theories on human vision. And one of them is called Contrast sensitivity functions. They are related to spatio and temporal of the light and their value presents at given init light, how much change is required before an observer reported there was a change. Notice the plural of the word "function", this is for the reason that we can measure Contrast sensitivity functions with not only black-white but also colors. The result of these experiments shows that in most cases our eyes are more sensitive to brightness than color.

Once we know that we're more sensitive to luma (the brightness in an image) we can try to exploit it.

Color model

We first learned how to color images work using the RGB model, but there are other models too. In fact, there is a model that separates luma (brightness) from chrominance (colors) and it is known as YCbCr*.

* there are more models which do the same separation.

This color model uses Y to represent the brightness and two color channels Cb (chroma blue) and Cr (chroma red). The YCbCr can be derived from RGB and it also can be converted back to RGB. Using this model we can create full colored images as we can see down below.

ycbcr example

Converting between YCbCr and RGB

Some may argue, how can we produce all the colors without using the green?

To answer this question, we'll walk through a conversion from RGB to YCbCr. We'll use the coefficients from the standard BT.601 that was recommended by the group ITU-R* . The first step is to calculate the luma, we'll use the constants suggested by ITU and replace the RGB values.