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Jan Ozer

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I help companies train new technical hires in streaming media-related positions; I also help companies optimize their codec selections and encoding stacks and evaluate new encoders and codecs. I am a contributing editor to Streaming Media Magazine, writing about codecs and encoding tools. I have written multiple authoritative books on video encoding, including Video Encoding by the Numbers: Eliminate the Guesswork from your Streaming Video (https://amzn.to/3kV6R1j) and Learn to Produce Video with FFmpeg: In Thirty Minutes or Less (https://amzn.to/3ZJih7e). I have multiple courses relating to streaming media production, all available at https://bit.ly/slc_courses. I currently work as www.netint.com as a Senior Director in Marketing.

Improve Your Video Quality

Includes the handout from my session at StreamingMedia East

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Wi-Fi on US Air Flights –

OK, I have a presentation to finalize for at StreamingMedia East, but my US Air flight bound for LaGuardia offered a free trial of inflight Wi-Fi (via Gogo, a service of Aircell), so how could I resist (particularly with the Players Championship coming to a close, and the Celts playing the Cavs)? I haven’t been flying a lot recently, but …

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The Moving Picture: Here Comes HTML5—Should We Care?

MIX10 is the annual Microsoft event for web developers and designers, and the big news from this year’s conference was expanded HTML5 support in Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), including support for the audio and video tags. Basically, this means that when IE9 ships (Microsoft didn’t announce a ship date), it will play video without a plug-in such as Flash or …

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Create an iPad-Compatible Video Site in 30 Seconds or Less

iPad compatibility has been top of mind for the last couple of months or so, and like all web producers, I’d like the ability to deliver video to the million plus iPads that have sold in the first few weeks since launch. Well here’s how in thirty seconds or less. By way of background, I was chatting with the Sorenson …

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Time to Switch from VP6 to H.264

Got an email today from a colleague today that triggered the headline thought (time to switch from VP6 to H.264). His rationale was that now that MPEG-LA has extended the royalty-free period for free H.264 Internet video, it was time to change over to H.264. He was wondering whether H.264 could maintain the same quality as VP6 at 75% of …

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Microsoft Sends Ogg Down for the Count; What’s Mozilla to Do?

In a recent blog post, Microsoft stated “We think H.264 is an excellent format. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only.”  Though Mozilla currently enjoys (by far) the largest HTML5-compatible installed base of any browser, they don’t currently support H.264; just Ogg Theora, which is supported by Google Chrome and Opera, but not Safari or …

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Case Study – Producing Video Case Studies

Firewall vendor WatchGuard Technologies uses video aggressively in their marketing efforts, and produces some of the most focused and highest quality case studies that I’ve seen, though the presentation of these videos on their web site could definitely be improved. In this “peer review” video, I review their case study of the Burlington Public Library, which you can watch here …

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Creating a Case Study – Interview with the Pros

I recently reviewed ten case-study videos on the Internet to choose one to review for StreamingMedia.com, and my review of that video will appear soon. I evaluated multiple factors in choosing a winner, including marketing focus, visual and audio quality, player presentation and encoded configuration. The clear winner in my mind was a case study produced by network security vendor …

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New Apple API Enables Flash GPU Acceleration on the Mac

One of the most divisive technology issues in recent times has been Flash performance on the Mac.  Apple fanatics claimed that Flash was buggy, unsecure and a CPU Hog, and Adobe acolytes claimed that performance suffered from Apple’s refusal to allow Adobe access to the GPU for H.264 decoding. Well, now we get to know who’s right, as Apple has …

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Streaming Production Training at the Richmond Federal Reserve

April – 2010 – I (Jan Ozer) just finished a one day training program at the Federal Reserve Bank in Richmond. The course curriculum focused on streaming production, and was an extended version of the training that I gave in New York in March. Here’s the agenda. It’s a fun course the borrows heavily from materials developed for the week …

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