Oooh, how interesting... [Good book. New Goals.]

The introduction chapter to MPEG video: Compression standard has been most enlightening. I now at least understand some of the basic concepts behind how video compression works. It also has pointed me to a couple of other resources: www.mpeg.org for references and www.ansi.org for the actual MPEG standard in all of its ugliness (I have yet to actually find the standard as the website is an absolute abomination of a user interface, but it appears that ISO/IEC 11172-1:1993 might be the first of three sections in the standard. It costs $157 to view it.)

With this in mind, lets break down my earlier goal of writing a program that encodes video into some smaller, more immediate goals.

1. Read the rest of MPEG video: Compression standard. Ok, so maybe not all 500 pages of textbook style writing, but at least a few more chapters on the details of the standard.
2. Check with the UW library to see if I have access to ANSI standards for free through them.
3. Explore www.mpeg.org. I have a feeling that I'm going to find some good stuff there.
4. Search for applications already in existence that do what my program wants to do. There is a good possibility that I won't actually need to program my own application before moving on to the next stage of my project.