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 …

A few weeks ago, I published an interview with MPEG LA CEO Larry Horn on the patent group’s decision not to charge for free content encoded with H.264. Then I got a note back from a reader who stated: I’m disappointed. The interview seemed to be pretty powder puff. Why not ask the harder questions, e.g., was your decision in …

So, I was doing some consulting work for a client who’s currently encoding with the x264 codec. Part of the work involved benchmarking their current quality against other encoding tools I have around the office, so I downloaded the x264 QuickTime Codec (Mac) from Softonic, which was the tool used by the client. Briefly, after installing the codec, you access …

I recently posted an H.264 vs. Ogg comparison, which you can see here. Ogg vs H264 – Round One I got lots of good feedback and am in the process of reworking my tests, primarily (I hope) to use a more recent codebase that wasn’t shipping when I did my testing. In the meantime, another comparison was released on February …

Five best practices for producing high-quality video. Anyone who’s ever picked up a camcorder and tried to tap into their inner- Spielberg knows that there’s a lot more to creating a high-quality, impactful movie than turning on the camcorder and pressing the red record button. The same is true with producing video for streaming. Corporate meetings are often recorded and …

[Author’s note: In early May, Apple opened the API for Adobe to access the GPU for H.264 acceleration from within Flash. Click here to view details and some early test results.]In part, Steve Jobs stated that the iPad didn’t support Flash because it was a “CPU Hog,” so Apple used a technology called HTML5 instead. Since the comparative efficiency of …