The H.264 codec is still the most widely used video compression technology — aka codec in the world and likely will be for the next few years. For this reason, every streaming media professional should know what the H.264 codec is and how to encode with H.264. This beginner’s guide …

I’m appearing on a panel next week at the SPIE Optics and Photonics Conference entitled Advanced Video Compression and Applications with a host of encoding luminaries. The panel will be streamed on August 3, 2021, at 3:30 PM PDT, but only registered guests can watch the Zoom feed (you can register …

In the first article in this series, Baby Steps with Apple’s Advanced Video Quality Tool and Quality Metric, I detailed what Apple’s Advanced Video Quality Tool (AVQT) is and how to use it. In this article, I tested multiple video files with Apple AVQT and describe my user experience. In …

Every time you encode a video file with a distribution-oriented codec like H.264, HEVC, VP9, or AV1, you choose a bitrate control technique that controls bitrate, overall quality, transient quality, and encoding cost. Examples of common rate control modes include CBR, VBR, CRF, and Capped CRF. This article discusses how …

This article on the Wowza website provides a quick overview of the AV1 codec: what it is, how it performs, what it costs, and what it’s good for today. It’s useful if you want to get a quick feel for where AV1 fits in with other codecs. The article is …

This video tutorial teaches you how to convert speech-to-text in Premiere Pro. I’ve been using Premiere Pro for more years than I care to think about, and most recent new features, as you’d expect with a mature product, are incremental. This new speech-to-text feature is absolutely an exponential addition that’s …

Just a quick post to advise potential students that we’ve supplemented the course Streaming Media 101 : Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals with five new Mac-based lessons, which are: Installing and using MediaInfo for the Mac Installing and using MP4 Bitrate Viewer Installing and using Apple’s Advanced Video Quality …

This article on the Wowza website provides a quick overview of the HEVC codec: what it is, how it performs, what it costs, and what it’s good for. It concludes with a section on what you need to know to effectively deploy the HEVC codec using the Wowza Streaming Engine …

I’m adding some lessons that identify and describe the operation of Mac video utilities to the online course Streaming Media 101 and took this as an opportunity to have a look at Apple’s Advanced Video Quality Tool  (AVQT) which launched at the company’s 2021 World Wide Developers Conference. I’m making …

Streaming producers need tools to explore different encoding options and verify their work. Here are two free Windows tools that I couldn’t live without. MediaInfo MediaInfo is a video analysis tool that displays the most significant data points regarding a video file, including resolution, data rate, codec, bit depth, frame …