Here’s the question on the table. x264’s veryslow preset delivers better quality than the medium preset but takes roughly 4x longer to encode, boosting your encoding costs by a healthy 4x (2-3x if using a cloud encoder). Which is the right preset for you, medium or veryslow? Like everything else in streaming, it depends. By way of background, in a …

Developing a metrics tool is the easy part. Wire up FFmpeg, shell out to libvmaf, parse the JSON, draw a pretty line chart. It’s a weekend project, and the part they show you at vibe-coding camp. The part they don’t show you are the edge cases: the files that are a frame short, the variable frame rates that quietly drift, the …

The AV2 spec went final in late May 2026, AOMedia announced it on June 9, and VeriSilicon had a decode IP core out within about two weeks. An AOMedia member survey reports that 53% of respondents plan to adopt AV2 within a year and 88% within two years. Over the next several months, expect a steady stream of AV2 support …

Video is increasingly captured primarily or exclusively for machine viewing, including applications like surveillance cameras, autonomous vehicles, industrial inspection, and drone footage. Traditional codecs like H.264 and HEVC were designed around human perception rather than machine vision tasks, which has opened the door to new compression approaches tailored to AI-driven workflows. Three emerging standards tackle this challenge from different angles: …

Live streaming has a fundamental tension that no existing protocol fully resolves. On one side sits WebRTC, which Ant Media describes as “ideal for real-time, interactive, low-latency communication like video calls, conferences, and interactive live streams.” On the other side sit HLS and DASH, which remain HTTP-based, CDN-friendly, and operationally mature at large scale, but practical low-latency variants still usually …

Most video engineers use a similar tool stack. MediaInfo for file data, Bitrate Viewer to view the bitrate of H.264-encoded files on Windows, Moscow State University VQMT on Windows for metrics, with a custom combination of data input scripts and Excel for RD curves and BD-Rate data. Most tools have critical gaps. Few let you compare videos during real-time playback, …

Executive Summary Most codec discussions orbit a familiar set of markets—consumer streaming, broadcast contribution, video conferencing—where the economics are well understood and the roadmaps relatively stable. But a growing share of the world’s video bits flow under constraints those markets don’t share: feeds that no human ever watches, downlinks measured in kilobits per second, latency budgets shorter than a frame, …

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 …

I spent 30 years assessing and interpreting codec quality. Here’s the tool I built to do it. The Toolchain You’re Stuck With You know the stack. MediaInfo for file information. Bitrate Viewer for data rate profiles. MSU VQMT for metrics and frame viewing. Excel for BD-Rate and RD curves. Another spreadsheet to estimate the financial implications of your encoding decisions. …

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 …