Much of the early buzz about the iPad centered around DVD or higher quality video, and certainly with the ability to play 720p video, the iPad can handle lots of high bandwidth, high quality streams. But what about if you’re encoding video to send via Wi-Fi, or cellular once the 3G version is released?  Well, there’s an app for that. …

HTML5 is the next generation markup language that contains a “video tag” that enables browsers to play videos without plug-ins like Flash, Silverlight or QuickTime. HTML5 has recently surfaced as a hot item because Apple shipped the iPad without Flash support, using HTML5 to play videos instead. For this reason, a number of web sites, most famously the New York …

Many organizations use video case studies to help market their products and services. I recently analyzed eleven video case studies, focusing on high level production techniques, how the video was encoded, and how the video was presented on the companies’ web pages. This article presents my findings, and should be useful to marketing professionals, video producers, compressionists and web developers. …

Today, if streaming video is at all integral to your organization, and if you’re currently hosting your own videos or posting them to user-generated content (UGC) sites such as YouTube and Vimeo, it’s time to consider using an online video platform (OVP). The big question that this article tackles is how to choose the right one for your needs. Rather …

If I were to take a long-term view of the successive Creative Suite (CS) releases from San Jose, Calif.-based Adobe Systems, I would equate them to a product created a bit further north in Napa Valley. As you may recall, for most Windows-based users, CS3 was a bit thin—Mac compatibility was the most prominent new feature. At some point, seemingly …

I’ve been researching how to encode video for adaptive bitrate streaming, specifically the encoding parameters for the different files streamed in the process. Here’s what I found for Adobe’s Dynamic Streaming, Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming and Microsoft’s Smooth Streaming. Adobe’s Dynamic Streaming For Dynamic Streaming, I found an excellent article by Larry Bouthillier on the StreamingMedia web site. Entitled How …

I didn’t vote for George Bush in his second term; truth be told, I wasn’t that keen on him his first term, but found him better than the alternative. But despite this opinion, I never felt it fair to blame him for all the awful events that happened on his watch. The Crash of 2000, Katrina, Enron, MCI, the sub-prime …

One of the tricks to speedy encoding with Sorenson Squeeze is to open multiple instances of the program and encode in parallel, which you could do on the Mac and in Windows through version 5.x. When I tested this with version 6, however, it no longer worked on the Mac. For this reason, when I reviewed Sorenson Squeeze for my …

I’ve been tracking Scalable Video Coding (SVC) for the last year or so and there’s been little tangible evidence of adoption. Recently Toronto-based Seawell Networks came out of stealth mode, but only barely, announcing that they are in the H.264 marketplace, but providing no product details. I met company CEO Brian Collie at a trade show last November, but he …

Xiph, Ogg and Crossing the Chasm When comparing Ogg Theora to H.264, most reviewers have focused solely on video quality. But that’s only a small component of what it will take for Ogg to achieve mainstream success. I just finished my first foray into encoding Ogg Theora and I have to say that I was impressed by the technology; especially …