A leading expert on H.264 encoding for live and on-demand production, and as contributing editor to Streaming Media Magazine, has tested most cloud, enterprise and desktop encoding tools, worked with most online video platforms (OVPs) and live streaming services, and many webcast platforms.
Configuring your video streams properly requires an understanding of three concepts; data rate, resolution and frame rate. In this article, I’ll define these terms and discuss the influences that impact your choices for each parameter. Then, at the end, I’ll walk you through a decision matrix designed to help you choose the optimal parameters for…
According to the latest statistics from NetMarketShare, the current penetration of HTML5-compatible browsers in the desktop market is 58.1% maximum. To completely serve these browers, you’d have to encode in three formats, with 47.5% of desktops compatible with WebM, 44.1% compatible with H.264, and 8.3% compatible with Ogg (this is the Firefox 3.6 crowd). To…
In the desktop/mobile streaming marketplace, most producers provide two sets of streams; HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) for Apple iOS devices and Android devices and either Flash or Silverlight for the desktop. A number of content and technology companies have gotten together to promote a specification called DASH, which stands for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP.…
Wow, what a roller coaster. Just last week, Adobe announced their decision to stop developing the Flash Player for mobile devices, a decision that looks predestined in retrospect. Faced with the expense of supporting a diverse and growing range of Android devices, while shut out in the iOS and Windows 8 markets, Adobe decided to…
Two new Amazon reviews for my book, Video Compression for Flash, Apple Devices and HTML5, both 5 star, though the UK review was kind of … mixed, shall we say. In the States, John Talbert was pretty positive, stating “This book is very technical and detailed. It is the perfect tool to help you decipher…
By now you’ve heard that Adobe will discontinue the development of the Flash Player on the Android platform, stating in part that “HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.” Boy, they weren’t…
My colleague Tim Siglin wrote an insightful analysis of Adobe’s decision to cease development of the mobile Flash Player that you can read here. To his credit, Siglin actually predicted that Adobe might withdraw Flash from mobile markets in his August article The TouchPad is Dead; Is Adobe’s Mobile Strategy Next? I just hope he…
Summary Depending upon the project type, rendering with GPU-acceleration in Creative Suite 5.5 can reduce rendering time by up to 92% over CPU-only rendering. Since NVIDIA’s CUDA technology is the only GPU that currently accelerates rendering in the Adobe Media Encoder and Premiere Pro, buying a notebook without NVIDIA hardware for CS5.5 production is a…
Executive Summary: Adobe’s Mercury Engine, as powered by NVIDIA’s CUDA-enabled graphics cards, can be a huge time saver during project preview and rendering. But the performance benefit depends upon the source content and project type. In some instances, a high-end CUDA card delivers the most benefits; in others, investing in a dual-CPU workstation makes more…
As discussed here, Adobe is withdrawing Flash from the mobile market. Here’s a video interview that Larry Kless shot of me at Streaming Media West in LA.