Ever wonder how a song gets from the guitar to an MP3, or video gets from the camera to your screen? Sure, everyone knows that an MP3 takes up less space than a WAV file because of “compression,” but do you know exactly what compression is?

Xiph.org, which is responsible for all the Ogg media projects (including Vorbis, and Theora), has put together a video which explains just about everything you want to know about digital video and audio, including what “frame rate” is, what a “gamma curve” is, why CRT sets use RGB, and explains everything from the invention of the telegraph to the latest in video computer files.

It’s a very informative watch, and it would have saved me a lot of headaches back when I had to explain concepts such as “interlacing” to coworkers.

It also uses HTML5 and the <video> tag to display the video, but they also provide a downloadable format in WebM and Ogg Theora.