Here is the finding that should shape how you spend money on multimedia books: in this one field, the free material is better and more current than the paid literature. Not “a useful supplement” — better. The specifications are free downloads, the best introduction is a GitHub repository, the reference documentation is regenerated nightly, and the standard textbooks describe a codec generation that shipped before most of the video you watched this week existed.
That is an odd thing to say on a page that also links to books. But it is what the evidence says, and a ladder that pretended otherwise would waste your money. So this one has five tiers, and Tier 0 is free — where most readers should start, and where a majority should stop. The tiers above it each have a narrow job, and the question asked of every one is not “is this a good book?” but “is it worth buying in 2026, given what you can read for nothing?“
Testing the Thesis Instead of Asserting It
“The free stuff is better” is the sort of claim that sounds like open-source cheerleading. So test it. Three tests, each with a checkable answer.
Test 1: currency — how old is the newest thing on each shelf?
Video compression moves on a specification cadence, not a publishing cadence, and the gap is measurable.
The ITU-T Recommendation for H.264 — the codec still carrying a large share of the world’s video — is a live, revised document. The edition in force is H.264 (06/26), approved 13 June 2026 (verified on itu.int, 18 August 2026). The current HEVC recommendation, H.265 (01/26), is dated January 2026 (itu.int). Both are freely downloadable as PDF; only the Word version sits behind an ITU account.
Now the books. The most respected book on H.264 is Iain Richardson’s second edition, published by Wiley in 2010. The specification it describes has been revised repeatedly since, most recently ten weeks before this was written. The gap is sixteen years and counting.
Meanwhile FFmpeg’s own documentation states plainly that it “is regenerated nightly, and corresponds to the newest FFmpeg revision.” A book is frozen at its printing. A nightly build is not.
Test 2: coverage — is there a book for the current codec generation?
AV1 was finalized in 2018. Searching Open Library’s catalogue on 18 August 2026 for a technical book on the AV1 codec returns zero results across three separate queries. Our own research pass reached the same conclusion independently in August 2026. There is no mature book literature for AV1, and none for VVC/H.266 either.
This is not a permanent law of nature — someone may publish one — but as of this writing the actual reference for the newest mainstream codec is the AV1 Bitstream & Decoding Process Specification, published by the Alliance for Open Media as a free PDF with no login and no paywall. (Free specification is not the same as free patents: AV1’s royalty-free status is AOMedia’s position and it is genuinely contested, with a rival patent pool and live litigation. That argument is out of scope here, but do not read “the spec is free” as “the codec is settled.”)
Test 3: what a book still does better
The honest counter-argument, and it is a real one. Free material is current but unsequenced. A specification tells you what is true; it never tells you what to read first, what matters, or why a decision was made. Books supply three things the free tier supplies badly: sequencing, because someone decided what order these ideas go in and was accountable for that choice; editorial compression, because a 900-page normative document and a 400-page explanation are not the same artifact; and depth in a stable subject, because a 2012 book on gamma is not out of date — gamma is not out of date.
That last point is the key to the whole ladder: the paid shelf is strongest exactly where the subject stopped moving, and weakest exactly where it kept moving. Buy accordingly.
The Five Tiers at a Glance
| Tier | You are trying to… | Free resource (start here) | Paid option | Worth buying? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 — Orientation | Understand why a file won’t play, and what a codec is | Leandro Moreira’s Digital Video Introduction; FFmpeg’s docs and ffmpeg-all; the FFmpeg and VideoLAN wikis; Werner Robitza’s CRF guide | — | No. Nothing here needs buying. |
| 1 — Fundamentals | Be permanently correct about color, gamma, and chroma subsampling | Charles Poynton’s own gamma and color FAQs at poynton.ca | Poynton, Digital Video and HD, 2nd ed. | Yes, if you touch pixels for a living. The subject doesn’t rot. |
| 2 — Codecs | Understand how a specific codec actually compresses | The ITU-T H.264/H.265 PDFs; the AV1 spec | Richardson’s Coding Video; Richardson’s H.264 2nd ed.; Sayood’s Introduction to Data Compression | One of them, maybe. See the datedness grid. |
| 3 — Primary sources | Read the normative document and follow it | ITU-T H.264/H.265, the AV1 spec, RFC 6716, the Matroska spec, the Bjøntegaard BD-rate document | — | No. This tier has no paid version. |
| 4 — Context | Understand why critical media infrastructure is maintained by volunteers | Nadia Eghbal, Roads and Bridges (free PDF) | Nadia Asparouhova, Working in Public | Optional. The free report carries the same thesis. |
Two tiers of five have no paid option at all, and a third recommends the free version first. That is the shape of this field.
Tier 0 — Free, Current, and Where Most Readers Should Stop
Leandro Moreira, Digital Video Introduction
If you read one thing, read this. The repository is BSD-3-Clause licensed, sits at roughly 16.3k stars and 1.4k forks, and has been translated into eight languages (English, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Korean, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish) — figures read from the repository on 18 August 2026.
It walks from basic terminology through redundancy removal (chroma subsampling — the trick of storing color at lower resolution than brightness, because human vision is far less sensitive to color detail), into how a codec actually works (prediction, transform, quantization, entropy coding), then bitstream formats, streaming, and hands-on FFmpeg examples you can run.
Critically, it treats AV1 as a first-class subject — history, licensing, and analyzer tooling included. No book on this ladder does. A free repository is currently the best AV1 teaching material in existence.
FFmpeg’s own documentation
Most people never look, which is a shame, because the documentation is the primary text that every book on this list describes at second hand. It is organized in layers: the command-line tools (ffmpeg, ffplay, ffprobe), the components (codecs, filters, formats, protocols, devices), the library APIs (libavcodec, libavformat, libavfilter and the rest), and general FAQ and developer material.
The single-page combined reference, ffmpeg-all, is the one to bookmark: every filter, muxer, demuxer, protocol and hardware-acceleration option in one searchable document. It is enormous and it is not a tutorial — but it is complete, and it corresponds to the running software rather than to a publisher’s release calendar. As of 18 August 2026 the current release is FFmpeg 8.1 “Hoare,” released 16 March 2026 (ffmpeg.org).
Worth reading alongside it: FFmpeg’s legal page, which explains that the project is LGPL 2.1 by default and that enabling GPL-covered optional parts makes all of FFmpeg GPL. It is also refreshingly blunt about patents — asked whether using FFmpeg requires patent licences, the project’s own answer is “We do not know, we are not lawyers so we are not qualified to answer this.” Software licensing and patent licensing are separate systems, and conflating them is the most expensive mistake in this subject.
The wikis, and Werner Robitza on rate control
The FFmpeg wiki and the VideoLAN wiki are community-editable and uneven, but they hold the practical encoding recipes that neither the docs nor the books cover.
For rate control, the standard practitioner explanation is Werner Robitza’s CRF guide — published 24 February 2017, last updated April 2019, by an author with a Ph.D. from Ilmenau University of Technology who works in video quality assessment. It explains constant rate factor as a quality target rather than a bitrate target, with concrete defaults: x264 ranges 0–51, default 23, sane band 18–28; x265 uses the same range with a default of 28; libvpx runs 0–63.
Note the trap in those numbers: CRF values are not comparable across encoders. CRF 23 in x264 and CRF 23 in x265 are not the same request. The guide is also nearly a decade old — verify current defaults against the encoder documentation before quoting it as today’s behaviour. Pair it with Robitza’s ffmpeg-quality-metrics tool: one resource explains the dial, the other tells you what the dial did.
Tier 1 — Fundamentals: Signals, Color, and the Things Everyone Gets Wrong
This is the tier where buying a book makes the most sense, for a counter-intuitive reason: the subject stopped changing.
Charles Poynton, Digital Video and HD: Algorithms and Interfaces, 2nd ed.
Elsevier’s own listing confirms the second edition, published 24 January 2012, described as “a one-stop shop for the theory and engineering of digital video systems” (shop.elsevier.com).
What it uniquely teaches: gamma, color science, luma versus luminance, sampling and quantization, chroma subsampling, and the digital interfaces that carry video signals. Poynton is the reference for the handful of things nearly everyone gets wrong, and getting them right is permanent knowledge. If you have ever wondered why a green-screen key falls apart at the edges, the answer is chroma subsampling — the same mechanism behind the practical limits in chroma-keyed portrait work.
Who it’s for: anyone who touches pixels professionally — colorists, camera and display engineers, graphics programmers, video engineers.
What is dated about it: it is not a codec book, and buying it as one is a mistake. Of 51 chapters, compression is concentrated in Part 5 — JPEG and Motion-JPEG, DV, MPEG-2, H.264, and VP8 — roughly a tenth of the text. There is no HEVC and no AV1 in it, because HEVC was finalized in 2013 and AV1 in 2018, after the book was printed. Nothing on modern rate control, nothing on the streaming era.
Worth buying in 2026? Yes — for color and signals, not for compression. Poynton also maintains free gamma and color FAQs at poynton.ca, a fair way to test whether you want the book.
Keith Jack, Video Demystified: A Handbook for the Digital Engineer, 5th ed.
The fifth edition: Newnes, 2007, 920 pages (Open Library catalogue record, ISBN 9780750683951, checked 18 August 2026). First published 1993, with a publisher lineage running from HighText through LLH Technology to Newnes/Elsevier.
What it uniquely teaches: broadcast-engineering-era knowledge — analog video, NTSC/PAL/SECAM, early digital broadcast standards, and the interface plumbing of professional video hardware. Nothing else on this ladder covers that layer.
Who it’s for: hardware and broadcast engineers, and anyone maintaining equipment from that era.
What is dated about it: the digital codec content is two full codec generations behind — the book predates HEVC by six years and AV1 by eleven. Treat it as history and signal intuition, never as a codec reference.
Worth buying in 2026? Only for the signal-level material, and largely a used-market purchase — a nineteen-year-old edition of a book whose sixth edition never arrived.
Tier 2 — Compression and Codecs
Here the shelf gets thin, and the most important advice is about telling three similar books apart.
Richardson’s three books are three different eras
Iain E. Richardson has written the standard codec texts for two decades, and his titles are routinely confused with each other. They are not interchangeable:
- H.264 and MPEG-4 Video Compression (Wiley, 2003) — written the same year H.264 was finalized. Superseded; Amazon’s own listing points to a newer edition.
- The H.264 Advanced Video Compression Standard, 2nd ed. (Wiley, 2010, Hoboken NJ — Open Library record, ISBN 9780470516928) — the revised successor, described in the catalogue as a revision of the 2003 title. Still H.264 only. It predates HEVC entirely.
- Coding Video: A Practical Guide to HEVC and Beyond (Wiley) — the current codec-specific title, centered on HEVC/H.265.
On that third book, one honest caveat and one genuine unknown. The unknown: its publication year is inconsistent across sources. Open Library’s catalogue record gives 2023 and 416 pages; the live Amazon listing shows a 2024 hardcover under ISBN 978-1118711781; an earlier research pass recorded a 2022 ISBN that does not match the retail listing. These have not been reconciled, and the discrepancy is reported rather than smoothed over. The caveat: “and Beyond” has not been confirmed to mean substantive AV1 or VVC coverage. Check the table of contents before buying it expecting either.
Worth buying in 2026? Coding Video is the only current codec-specific book on this ladder, so if you want one, it is the one. The H.264 titles are for readers with a specific H.264 reason — legacy systems, standards work, or the pleasure of watching a codec explained by someone who was there.
Khalid Sayood, Introduction to Data Compression, 5th ed.
Elsevier lists the fifth edition as published 23 October 2017, covering “the entire field of data compression” across 19 chapters — lossless methods (Huffman, arithmetic coding, dictionary techniques) and lossy ones (scalar and vector quantization, transform coding), applied to image, speech, text, audio and video (shop.elsevier.com).
What it uniquely teaches: the theory underneath every codec rather than the details of any one. Entropy coding is entropy coding whether the bitstream says H.264 or AV1, and this is the book that makes that stage stop being magic.
What is dated about it: the publisher’s own description calls HEVC “the new HEVC standard” — which tells you exactly where the 2017 edition sits. It is not a video-specific book and does not pretend to be.
Worth buying in 2026? Yes, if you want the mathematics to stay useful after the current codec generation is replaced. It is the least perishable book on this list after Poynton.
The AV1 gap, and what it tells you
There is no verified, mature technical book on AV1 — three Open Library queries on 18 August 2026 returned nothing, and an independent research pass earlier in the month reached the same result. The same holds for VVC/H.266.
That absence is worth sitting with. A codec finalized in 2018, shipping in hardware and carried by every major streaming platform, has no book — because the field now transmits knowledge through specifications, reference implementations and conference papers, faster than publishing cycles can track. It is the same dynamic that makes reading primary sources a core skill elsewhere: the Chromium codebase is likewise better documented by its own tree than by any book about it.
Tier 3 — The Primary Sources, Which Have No Paid Equivalent
At this rung you stop reading explanations of documents and read the documents. Most are free.
- ITU-T H.264 — “Advanced video coding for generic audiovisual services,” in-force edition H.264 (06/26), approved 13 June 2026, free PDF (itu.int).
- ITU-T H.265 — “High efficiency video coding,” in-force edition H.265 (01/26) (itu.int).
- The AV1 Bitstream & Decoding Process Specification — Alliance for Open Media, free PDF, no login (aomediacodec.github.io). Note that the HTML rendering on the same site carries a header identifying it as an internal working document and points to the PDF as the approved version — cite the PDF.
- RFC 6716 — the Opus audio codec (Valin, Vos and Terriberry, IETF, September 2012), unusually readable for a codec document (datatracker.ietf.org).
- The Matroska specification — a free, element-by-element HTML reference from the nonprofit Matroska organisation (matroska.org). The best short cure for container-versus-codec confusion, because Matroska says outright what it is and is not.
- Bjøntegaard, “Calculation of Average PSNR Differences between RD-Curves” — ITU-T VCEG document VCEG-M33, April 2001. The origin of BD-rate, the correct way to state a compression-efficiency comparison. Almost nobody who cites “BD-rate” has read it.
One paywalled exception: ISO/IEC 14496-12, the ISO Base Media File Format that MP4 is built on, is sold rather than given away, consistent with ISO’s general policy.
On quality metrics, Netflix’s VMAF project is the reference implementation and its documentation is better than any book chapter on the subject. One thing to get right: VMAF ships two model generations, with the v1 models released in June 2026 alongside the older v0 set. Any VMAF score is meaningless without naming the model that produced it — and most VMAF writing online still describes v0 without saying so.
Tier 4 — Why Volunteers Maintain the Software Running Your Video
The last rung is not technical. FFmpeg is in your browser, your phone, your TV, and a large share of the internet’s video infrastructure — maintained by a small community that most of its largest corporate beneficiaries have never paid.
Nadia Eghbal, Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure (Ford Foundation, 2016) is the free version of that argument, available as a free PDF and EPUB from the Ford Foundation and examining the lack of institutional support for public code.
Nadia Asparouhova, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software (Stripe Press, 2020) is the longer, later treatment. Same author — the 2016 report circulates under Eghbal, the 2020 book is published under Asparouhova — so cite whichever name the specific work carries.
Its central claim is that maintenance, not creation, is where the real and largely uncompensated labour sits. That describes the friction between FFmpeg’s maintainers and well-resourced corporate users almost exactly, and it generalizes — the same question drives who funds the Tor network. Start with the free report; buy the book only if the thesis grabs you.
The Datedness Grid
What each book covers, and what survives its age.
| Book | Newest codec generation covered | What still holds | Worth buying in 2026? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Poynton, Digital Video and HD, 2nd ed. (2012) | H.264, VP8. No HEVC, no AV1 | Gamma, color science, luma vs luminance, chroma subsampling, sampling and interfaces — none of it perishable | Yes, for color and signals. Never as a codec book |
| Jack, Video Demystified, 5th ed. (2007) | Pre-HEVC, largely pre-H.264-deployment | Analog and broadcast signal chains, NTSC/PAL/SECAM, hardware interfaces | Rarely, and mostly used-market. Historical and signal-level only |
| Richardson, H.264 and MPEG-4 Video Compression (2003) | H.264 at finalization | Motion compensation, transform and entropy-coding fundamentals | No — superseded by his own 2nd edition |
| Richardson, The H.264 Advanced Video Compression Standard, 2nd ed. (2010) | H.264 only | The clearest explanation of one codec’s internals, with deployment experience | Only with a specific H.264 reason |
| Richardson, Coding Video: A Practical Guide to HEVC and Beyond (year inconsistent across sources) | HEVC/H.265. AV1/VVC coverage unconfirmed | The most current codec-specific book found anywhere | Yes, if you want one codec book. Check the contents first |
| Sayood, Introduction to Data Compression, 5th ed. (2017) | HEVC described as “new” | Entropy coding, quantization, transform coding — the theory outlives every codec | Yes, for durable fundamentals |
| Asparouhova, Working in Public (2020) | Not a technical book | The maintenance-burden thesis, unchanged and increasingly relevant | Optional — the free 2016 report carries it |
How to Actually Climb This
- “My file won’t play.” Tier 0, one hour — Moreira’s guide on terminology and codecs. You need the container-versus-codec distinction and nothing else. Buy nothing.
- “I encode video and want to stop guessing.” Tier 0 plus Robitza’s CRF guide and the FFmpeg docs. Still nothing to buy. To defend a quality claim, add VMAF’s documentation and the Bjøntegaard document.
- “My colors are wrong and I don’t know why.” The one case where a book is the fastest path: Poynton.
- “I need one codec deeply.” Coding Video for HEVC; the free ITU-T PDF for H.264; the free AOMedia spec for AV1, because nothing else exists.
- “I want this to survive the next codec.” Sayood, plus the specs. Compression theory does not obsolete; bitstream syntax does.
The through-line: the more current the topic, the more likely the best resource is free — and the more stable the topic, the more likely a book earns its price. That is why this ladder is not sorted by price.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
Are there any good multimedia books, or is this page telling me not to buy anything? There are good ones, and this ladder names them. The point is narrower: the paid shelf is strongest where the subject is stable — color science, information theory, the sustainability question — and weakest where it moves fastest, which is codecs. Buy Poynton for color, Sayood for theory, and read the free material for everything current.
Why is there no good AV1 book? As of 18 August 2026, three separate Open Library catalogue searches returned no technical book on the AV1 codec, matching an independent research pass earlier in the month. The plausible explanation is timing: AV1 was finalized in 2018 and the field now moves through specifications, reference implementations and conference papers faster than a book can be written, reviewed and printed. The free AOMedia specification is the actual reference.
Do I need to buy the specifications? Mostly no. ITU-T H.264 and H.265 are free PDF downloads from itu.int, the AV1 specification is a free PDF from AOMedia, RFC 6716 is free from the IETF, and the Matroska specification is free HTML. The notable exception is ISO/IEC 14496-12, the MP4-family container standard, which ISO sells.
Is FFmpeg’s documentation really better than a book about FFmpeg? For reference purposes, yes — it is regenerated nightly against the current source, which no book can match. What it does not give you is a learning path, which is exactly the gap Leandro Moreira’s free guide fills. Between those two, the case for a paid FFmpeg book is weak.
What’s the difference between H.264 and x264, and does it change what I should read? H.264 is a standard — a published specification. x264 is one encoder that produces H.264-compliant output, and it is a VideoLAN project. (dav1d, the AV1 decoder, is also VideoLAN’s; x265 is MulticoreWare’s, built on x264 code licensed from VideoLAN.) It changes what you read a great deal: standards are documented by ITU-T recommendations and books like Richardson’s, while encoder behaviour — presets, CRF, tuning — lives in project documentation and practitioner writing, never in a textbook.
I only have time for one thing. What is it? Leandro Moreira’s Digital Video Introduction. It is free, current, covers AV1, and will take you further in an afternoon than any single purchase on this page.
📚 Further Reading
Free, and the actual starting point
- Leandro Moreira, Digital Video Introduction — the best free on-ramp, AV1 included.
- FFmpeg documentation — regenerated nightly;
ffmpeg-allis the one-page reference. - Werner Robitza’s CRF guide — the standard explanation of rate control.
- VideoLAN wiki — community documentation for VLC, x264 and the surrounding tooling.
The specifications
- ITU-T H.264 and ITU-T H.265 — free PDFs.
- AV1 Bitstream & Decoding Process Specification — AOMedia, free.
- RFC 6716 — Opus.
- Matroska technical specification — free, element by element.
Measurement and licensing
- Netflix VMAF — the reference implementation; note the v1 models released June 2026.
- FFmpeg legal page — LGPL versus GPL, and the project’s own position on patents.
The sustainability question
- Nadia Eghbal, Roads and Bridges — free PDF and EPUB, Ford Foundation, 2016.
Elsewhere on this site
- Understanding Internet Bandwidth — why compression is not optional in the first place.
- Books to Learn About Transformers — the same reading-ladder treatment for a field where the paid literature is much healthier.
📚 Recommended Resources
Disclosure: some links below are Amazon affiliate links. If you buy through them, I earn a small commission — at no extra cost to you — which helps keep this site running.
Read this first, because it is the whole point of the article above. Before any book on this list, the free material wins: Leandro Moreira’s Digital Video Introduction is the best on-ramp in existence and the only one treating AV1 as a first-class subject; FFmpeg’s documentation is regenerated nightly against current source; the ITU-T H.264 and H.265 recommendations and the AV1 specification are free PDFs. None of them has an ASIN, because none of them is sold.
The books below are the minority of cases where paper genuinely earns its price — mostly where the subject stopped moving.
Digital Video and HD: Algorithms and Interfaces
Charles Poynton · Book · 2nd edition, Morgan Kaufmann/Elsevier
The strongest buy on this page, and not a codec book — buy it for color science, gamma, luma versus luminance, sampling, and chroma subsampling. Those subjects do not obsolete, which is why a 2012 imprint is still the reference. Compression occupies roughly a tenth of its 51 chapters and stops at H.264 and VP8; there is no HEVC and no AV1 in it.
Introduction to Data Compression
Khalid Sayood · Book · 5th edition, Morgan Kaufmann
The theory under every codec rather than the details of any one — entropy coding, quantization, transform coding, across image, audio, speech and video. The least perishable technical book here after Poynton: bitstream syntax changes with each codec generation, the mathematics does not. Its 2017 vintage shows in a publisher description that still calls HEVC “new.”
Coding Video: A Practical Guide to HEVC and Beyond
Iain E. Richardson · Book · Wiley
The only current codec-specific book on this ladder, centred on HEVC/H.265. Two honest caveats before you buy: its publication year is inconsistent across sources (Open Library records 2023 and 416 pages; this listing shows a 2024 hardcover), and “and Beyond” has not been confirmed to mean substantive AV1 or VVC coverage — check the table of contents if that is what you are after.
The H.264 Advanced Video Compression Standard
Iain E. Richardson · Book · 2nd edition, Wiley, 2010
Still the clearest book-length explanation of a single codec’s internals, written with a decade of deployment experience behind it. Buy it only with a specific H.264 reason — legacy systems, standards work, or wanting one codec explained end to end. It predates HEVC entirely, and the ITU-T recommendation it describes has been revised many times since, most recently in June 2026.
H.264 and MPEG-4 Video Compression
Iain E. Richardson · Book · 1st edition, Wiley, 2003
The original, written the year H.264 was finalized — and superseded by the author’s own second edition above, which Amazon’s listing itself points to. Listed here only so the three Richardson titles are not confused with one another, which is the single most common mistake on this shelf. Effectively a used-market purchase for readers who want the 2003 text specifically.
Video Demystified: A Handbook for the Digital Engineer
Keith Jack · Book · 5th edition, Newnes, 2007
A broadcast-engineering artifact, and valuable as one: analog video, NTSC/PAL/SECAM, and the interface plumbing of professional video hardware, which nothing else on this ladder covers. Its digital codec content is two full generations behind — it predates HEVC by six years and AV1 by eleven. A used-market buy for signal-level history, never a working codec reference.
Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
Nadia Asparouhova · Book · Stripe Press, 2020
Not about video at all, and the best explanation of why the software decoding your video is maintained by a handful of unpaid people. Its thesis — that maintenance, not creation, is where the real and largely uncompensated labour sits — describes FFmpeg’s situation almost exactly. Start with the same author’s free 2016 Ford Foundation report Roads and Bridges (published under Nadia Eghbal) and buy this only if the argument grabs you.
Free and worth more than most of the shelf above: Leandro Moreira’s Digital Video Introduction, FFmpeg’s ffmpeg-all reference, the ITU-T H.264/H.265 PDFs, the AOMedia AV1 specification, the Matroska specification, Werner Robitza’s CRF guide, Netflix’s VMAF documentation, and Roads and Bridges. There is no AV1 or VVC book to recommend — as of August 2026 none exists, and the specifications are the literature.