The Common Media Application Format (CMAF) is supposed to be the Holy Grail of streaming; one set of files that you can deliver to multiple output points. How well does it work today? This 3:47 video shows you. I started by creating CMAF output in AWS Elemental MediaConvert. Why? Because they supply useful templates, have…
This article details how to use FFmpeg to benchmark decoder speed. Much of the info was derived from this FFmpeg Wiki. This article was updated to show results when the source file is played from a RAM drive and for additional definitions as reflected below. I just completed a consulting project that involved analyzing decoder…
In a blog full of wonky compression articles, this could be the wonkiest article of all. If you’re not using capped CRF encoding, or considering the same, it’s almost certainly not of interest. If you are using capped CRF encoding (for constant rate factor), however, you almost certainly will find it interesting and perhaps even…
It’s always good to review which articles readers found valuable over the past year to help focus on producing similar content in the future. By publishing the top ten, hopefully, those reading this article will see some articles they might find useful. So, without further ado, here were the top ten articles from the Streaming…
Author’s note: This is a very simple automation technique for FFmpeg beginners. I’m sure there are much more efficient ways to script this project, but this represents my baby steps in FFmpeg automation. I recently started a consulting project that involved encoding multiple files to multiple CRF values to create rate-distortion curves and BD-Rate computations.…
Any book author will tell you that while the revenue is nice, hearing from readers that find your book useful is even better. In this regard, I’m excited to blog about the following new five-star review of my book Encoding by the Numbers. What I tried to do in Encoding by the Numbers was to…
Encoding files with Open-GOPs is supposed to produce better quality than closed GOPs because B and P frames can reference frames located outside the GOP. However, files produced for ABR streaming should have closed GOPs. This paper explores the defaults for x264 and x265, the quality difference between closed and open GOPs, and the RADL…
On September 11, 2019, Streaming Media Magazine published an article entitled Hardware-Based Transcoding Solutions Roundup: Testing Performance, that compared various H.264 and HEVC encoders using objective and subjective testing. The HEVC encoders tested included Intel’s SVT (Scalable Video Technology)-HEVC, a software-based codec; NGCodec’s FPGA-based HEVC encoder (now owned by Xilinx) and x265 using the medium…
Recently, video quality metrics have gotten a lot of hate, primarily from codec vendors. For example, yesterday on LinkedIn, respected Beamr CTO Dror Gill wrote, “everyone agrees that subjective (human) testing is the only accurate way to measure true perceptual quality.” After I pointed out industry support for using video quality metrics, Gill graciously changed…
My Streaming Media session on using video quality metrics is now available for replay immediately below. You can download the handout here. Here’s the session description. T101. HOW-TO: Fine-Tuning Your Encoding With Objective Quality Metrics Tuesday, November 19: 10:30 a.m. – 11:15 a.m. Choosing the number of streams in an adaptive group and configuring them…