Few things in life are more fun than playing with the latest, greatest notebook computer. For the last few months, I’ve had the pleasure of working with HP’s EliteBook 8760w, which is the most powerful notebook I’ve ever tested. It’s a highly potent combination of Intel i7 CPU, NVIDIA 5010M GPU and an appropriately named DreamColor display. You can read …

Sometimes I get so caught up in Flash video that I forget that Flash does many other things, from serving as the environment for the WeVideo editor to enabling sites like the Economist to present interactive data relating to the upcoming presidential election. If you visit the Economist, you can click each state to see the latest poll figures for …

…is NOT how they encode their video. But, they do a lot of other things right with their streaming video. GoDaddy.com aggressively advertises videos on television to convince you to visit their web site. With celebrities Danica Patrick and Jillian Michaels on board, it’s a pretty good strategy. Of course, when most viewers see these TV commercials, they probably wonder …

DASH stands for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP, and it’s MPEG spec that was unanimously ratified on December 2, 2011. What is DASH? As I open in my article What is MPEG DASH for Streaming Media Magazine: MPEG DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) is a developing ISO Standard (ISO/IEC 23009-1) that should be finalized by early 2012. As the …

Here’s the introduction. The referenced video on YouTube details the 28 hours I spent in Manhattan with my girlies last September, including our visit to the Empire State Building, Times Square and the Today Show, plus a clip of my daughter subway surfing. “While the desktop video editing market has consolidated into the big four (Adobe, Apple, Avid, and Sony), …

In my latest survey, the average video configuration was very close to 640×360, with a combined audio/video data rate of 837 kbps (758 kbps video, 79 kbps audio). This computes to an average bits per pixel value of .115. If videos posted on your site are lower than these figures, you’re probably being unnecessarily conservative. I track the data rate …

I don’t spend a lot of time in the big-iron encoding space, but I was pleasantly surprised a few weeks ago when I saw Elemental Technologies, who sells GPU-based hardware encoders, written about in BusinessWeek. So when the company approached Streaming Media Magazine with an exclusive story about ESPN using their technology, I was psyched to chat with company president …

This article discusses what data rate is and why it’s important, and what bits per pixel measures and how to compute it.  What is Data Rate? Data rate (or bit rate) is the amount of data per second of video, usually expressed in kilobits (kbps) or megabits per second (Mbps). When I say that ESPN distributes their video at 800 …

According to the latest statistics from NetMarketShare, the current penetration of HTML5-compatible browsers in the desktop market is 58.1% maximum. To completely serve these browers, you’d have to encode in three formats, with 47.5% of desktops compatible with WebM, 44.1% compatible with H.264, and 8.3% compatible with Ogg (this is the Firefox 3.6 crowd). To calculate these numbers, I created …

In the desktop/mobile streaming marketplace, most producers provide two sets of streams; HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) for Apple iOS devices and Android devices and either Flash or Silverlight for the desktop. A number of content and technology companies have gotten together to promote a specification called DASH, which stands for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP. Its promise is a single …