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 …

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 …