The top rung of your encoding ladder is the most expensive to deliver, and in many regions, it’s also the most frequently viewed. Encode at too high a bit rate and you’re wasting money; encode too low, and you’re potentially reducing viewer quality of experience. This makes choosing the top rung bitrate a key task for all streaming producers. This …

I’m exceptionally pleased to return to in-person teaching at Streaming Media East, which will be held on May 24–25, 2022, at the Westin Copley Place in Boston, MA. I’ll be producing two 3-hour workshops on May 23, the Monday before the event, and presenting and/or moderating three sessions during the event. As usual, each one is designed to give you information …

Just a quick note that I’ve updated the course, Streaming Media 101: Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals, with new codec lessons for H.264, VP9, HEVC, AV1, VVC, LCEVC, and EVC. Each lesson, which vary in length from 12 to 20 minutes, covers the topics shown in the agenda below. The lessons are designed to bring the students up to …

My article, Buyers’ Guide to Per-Title Encoding is up on Streaming Media. Per-title encoding is one of the simplest and least expensive ways to reduce streaming bandwidth, increase viewer QoE, or accomplish both. It’s becoming a standard feature in cloud-encoding services. The article begins with an overview of what per-title encoding is and why it’s important. Then it compares per-title …

My tutorial How to Encode with FFmpeg 5.0 is up on Streaming Media.com. By way of background, on January 17, 2022, FFmpeg released FFmpeg 5.0, called Lorentz. To celebrate and to help introduce new users to the power and ease of FFmpeg, I created this entry-level tutorial for single and two-pass encoding with FFmpeg. You’ll learn basics like: Choosing the …

My State of Video Codecs 2022 article is up on Streaming Media Magazine. The article identifies the most significant announcements from the last year relating to H.264, VP9, HEVC, AV1, Versatile Video Coding (VVC), Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding (LCEVC), and Essential Video Coding (EVC). If you’re looking for a good way to catch up with these codecs, you’ll find …

A consulting client sent the following command string for a 1080p file they were encoding for upload to Vimeo, their online video platform. crf=20:vbv-maxrate=10000:vbv-bufsize=9500 What’s wrong with these parameters? First, some theory. One distinction to understand when encoding files is the difference between producing a mezzanine file to use for subsequent transcoding and encoding for distribution. When producing a mezzanine …

It’s a well-known and oft-repeated truism that codecs operate more efficiently at higher resolutions. The question is, is the truism really true? It turns out that it is, and we prove it below. To lend numbers to our truism and focus the issue, the basic question is this. 8K video has 16 times the pixels of 1080p videos. So, if …

I’ve been wondering if publishers still care about constraining their maximum bitrates (see here for more background), so I grabbed my copy of youtube-dl and performed a little study. The TL/DR version seems to be that new media sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Vimeo don’t strictly adhere to the typical 200% constrained VBR limit while traditional publishers seem to, though …

I’m comparing cloud-based per-title VOD encoding technologies for a report I hope to publish in the near term. In an attempt to create a level playing field I set the following specifications. 2-second GOP 200% constrained VBR 2-second VBV buffer Kind of like you were encoding with FFmpeg and using these parameters -b:v 2600k -maxrate 5200k -bufsize 5200k All cloud services …