Media encoding

What you will learn:

You'll learn how speech and video is sampled, quantised, and compressed to reduce data volumes while maintaining an acceptable quality. You will also learn the capabilities and operation of various types of codec and their role in telephony, video streaming, and digital broadcasting.

 

By the end of this course you will be able to:

• explain the digital communications system constraints that necessitate the compression of encoded speech and video signals.
• state the audio bandwidth requirements of speech and music signals and describe why the allocated audio bandwidth is restricted before encoding takes place.
• describe the principles of PCM analogue to digital encoding and the principles and benefits of non-linear encoding.
• describe the principles of the compression techniques employed to minimise the bit rate of encoded speech and music.
• explain the disadvantages of compression.
• describe the characteristics of the types of encoder used for telephony, digital broadcasting and music downloads.
• describe the bit rate requirements of video traffic and the principles of JPEG and MPEG video compression.
• describe the characteristics of the codecs used for video telephony and conferencing, television broadcasting, and video streaming services.

 

Course prerequisites:

An understanding of the basic properties of analogue and digital signals. It is recommended that the PTT course "Analogue and digital signals" is studied before attempting this course.

 

Approximate study time: 5 hours 

 

Delivery platform requirements:
To access the course, a computer/tablet running a browser such as Chrome, Safari, Edge etc. is required. The device should have an active Internet connection and a screen resolution of at least 1024x768.