For anyone reading this, I highly recommend doing as much as possible within MATLAB. Its secret sauce is that it operates on vectors (arrays and matrices) inst

For anyone reading this, I highly recommend doing as much as possible within MATLAB. Its secret sauce is that it operates on vectors (arrays and matrices) instead of primitives (ints, floats etc). It simply runs circles around almost every other language that I've used. Its real power comes from its domain toolboxes (libraries): https://www.mathworks.com/products.html https://www.mathworks.com/products.html But the language itself is uniquely readable even for its brevity. You can do things in a few lines of code that would take 10 pages in a scripting language or 100 pages in lower level languages like C or Java. Here's the most concise explanation for how JPEG/MPEG compression works that I've ever found: https://www.mathworks.com/help/images/discrete-cosine-transform.html https://www.mathworks.com/help/images/discrete-cosine-transf... If you can't afford MATLAB right now then you can at least play around with the language in GNU Octave: https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/ https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/