You think you know RD Curves. You think you know encoding ladders. I’m here to tell you, you don’t know diddly.  The RD Curve above compares encoding ladders for VP9, HEVC, and H.264. It’s a short, idiosyncratic clip. Don’t focus on what you know about codec efficiencies. Focus on what you think the RD Curves tell you.  Which codec is …

Note To Previous Downloaders Bad news. Good news. Bad news: we screwed up. The download link included with the first beta pointed to a test-mode checkout, which meant you couldn’t make a purchase. Real cards get rejected, and nothing happens. Sorry. That’s on me. Good news: v1.0.1 is available and much more functional than the first beta. If you download …

This report illustrates and compares the royalty calculations of two patent licensing programs, Access Advance’s Video Distribution Patent (VDP) Pool and Avanci Video, using eight streaming service templates modeled after well-known platforms. The purpose is to help streaming services understand how the two programs calculate royalties and compare potential royalty costs side by side. I believe that the best way …

I’ve been tracking CMSD-MQA for a while now. Briefly, Common Media Server Data for Media Quality Assessment (CMSD-MQA) is a draft SVTA standard that defines how video quality scores like VMAF, PSNR, and SSIM, generated at the encoder, can be carried downstream through the delivery chain as standardized metadata, giving packagers, origin shields, and monitoring systems actionable quality information without …

On March 24, 2026, Dolby sued Snap Inc. (Snapchat) for AV1 and HEVC patent infringement in the United States and Brazil. The suits are the first AV1 assertion against a streaming platform by an Access Advance licensor, and Dolby is seeking injunctive relief in both countries. The reason this matters beyond Snap is a single legal fact: Dolby is asserting …

I recently interviewed Damien Sterkers, VP of Products and Solutions Marketing at Broadpeak, to discuss the company’s new multiview solution for live streaming. Briefly, Broadpeak has developed an innovative server-side approach that delivers the best of both worlds: the universal device compatibility of server-side multiview without the massive encoding costs that approach typically requires. You can watch the video on …

For most of the live encoding era, the operator’s main job was picking a bitrate. You’d set a target, the encoder would hit it, and quality was whatever came out the other end. Simple content looked great. Complex content looked terrible. The encoder didn’t care because you told it to deliver bits, not quality. Then came a generation of smarter …

Contextual advertising matches ads to content rather than to people. The logic is straightforward: a viewer watching content about home renovation is likely receptive to a Home Depot ad at that moment, whereas a behavioral retarget from last week’s browsing is not. The problem is that behavioral targeting depends on third-party data that is becoming increasingly unavailable as privacy regulation …

I recently consulted with a company that was running capped CRF-type encoding across four codecs simultaneously: x264, VP9, NVIDIA H.264, and NVIDIA AV1. The first two were VOD encoding, the second two live. I was genuinely impressed by the sophistication and practicality of this video engineering setup, so I asked the client if I could share what they were doing. …

On February 12, I interviewed David Ronca, formerly of Netflix and Meta, now RoncaTech, about the latest Beta version of his Video Codec Acid Test, or VCAT, which now includes VVC decode courtesy of Fraunhofer’s open-source VVeC decoder. The interview is available here on YouTube. Here’s an overview of the highlights we covered, with timestamps for the video. To get …