Distributedmm Web site: Multimedia source
© Palmer Agnew and AnneKellerman
Chapter 1, Framework
- Image Compression Examples Shows 11 compressed forms of 2 original images. You can see what sorts of image are suitable for JPEG compression, what sorts are suitable for GIF, and how much compression images can tolerate without degrading their quality.
- Digital Still-Camera Resolutions Shows a 640 x 480 pixel image and a 1600 x 1200 pixel image, which could be taken by different sorts of digital still cameras. They can support significantly different print sizes or monitor window sizes.
- Capture: Sample and Quantize Shows an analog waveform along with vertical lines that represent sampling instants and horizontal lines that represent available quantization values. You can practice digitizing the waveform by drawing the best approximation that is constrained to follow the lines. This illustrates the basis of digitizing both audio and video.
- E-cinema Resolution and Star Wars Tells how we observed digital artifacts in a theater and then used simple measurements to obtain a good estimate the Digital Light Processor projector's resolution. We also discuss movies' aspect ratios and anamorphic lenses that allow a screen to be far wider than the underlying digital image.
- Adding and Subtracting To Get Desired Colors Illustrates a spectrum of 8 colors that children would be well advised to memorize instead of "red, orange, yellow..." We show how to make each of these colors using either the additive primaries or the subtractive primaries.
Chapter 2, Delivery
- Timely, placely, and/or personal information Uses a Venn diagram to show the 8 combinations of information that is timely (appropriate to the current time, placely (appropriate to the current location), and personal (specifically of interest to you) and gives a couple of examples of each. We note that information that has all 3 of these properties is the most valuable to you, especially if you are using a low-bandwidth wireless link.
Chapter 3, Servers
- New Peer-To-Peer Personal Video Recorders Illustrates how the most recent PVRs can connect to both metropolitan area networks and local area networks to store and share movies and other videos. A new PVR can thus be not only an over-the-edge-cache server to time-shift programs for its owner but also a peer-to-peer file sharing server to space-shift programs for others.
