

Ask HN: Where can I learn more about programming video and audio codecs? - radmuzom

Pardon me if this is a stupid question, but I barely have any knowledge about programming audio and video codecs.<p>Is it just software knowledge? Or do I need knowledge about hardware &#x2F; physics &#x2F; electronics to actually write code which would say decode a file and display the stored video inside it on my screen.
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stephengillie
If you _want_ to learn about the physics of electron scanning, it probably
won't hurt. :) But the basics shouldn't be too complex. I can only give you
general details, hopefully someone else visits this thread with more
specifics.

For video, all you're doing is reading an image from disk, decoding
(decrypting) it, displaying it somehow (send it to a display buffer? Have a
window drawer draw it?), and then starting with the next image in the stream.
There's some timings, and reuse of data from the previous image, but it can
all be done programmatically.

I'm more fuzzy about audio, but I believe you're basically loading audio data
from disk, decoding it, then output to an audio buffer that does the DAC etc
for you. Timings again, but still nothing that's not programmatic.

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knweiss
Monty's videos are a good start:

[https://www.xiph.org/video/](https://www.xiph.org/video/)

[https://www.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/](https://www.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/)

