I think this book is excellent and so far, the only text I have found that covers the technological fundamentals of digital video without resorting to complex mathematics. The section on the DCT transform is worth the cover price alone as it manages to explain a seriously difficult topic in simple language.The comment in the previous review about MP3 is a little unfair in that MP3 has nothing to do with MPEG-3 at all and is in fact a subset of the MPEG-2 standard (which is covered in detail in the book). MPEG-3 was abandoned early in its development process and hence it is entirely correct that the reviewer should focus on MPEG-2 and MPEG-4.