If you bought a camcorder ten years ago, chances were it was DV and stored its video on DV tape. Three years ago, it was likely HDV and DV tape. Today, it could be any one of five or six HD formats (AVCHD, HDV, DVCPRO HD, XDCAM HD, AVC-Int

Over the next two or three years, streaming producers will be increasingly tasked supplying optimized video streams to devices as disparate as cell phones and set top boxes, along with different quality versions for users accessing the con

Dicas produces the H.264 codec used by Telestream in most (if not all) of their encoding products, including Episode Pro and Episode Engine. On June 11, 2009, Dicas announced a new quality enhancing algorithm called dicasVICO that the company clai

This video tutorial details how to use Apple Compressor to produce H.264 video files for Flash distribution. Here's some  background information explaining some of the encoding decisions made in the tutorial. First, the project involved a concer

Screencams are a wonderful tool for demonstrating software operation. In many cases, producing them can almost be a real-time event—you capture and narrate simultaneously, import the result into Camtasia Studio, add titles and such, export t

In Producing Screencams that Market and Sell, I described how to script, record, and edit a screencam presentation for fun or profit. In this article, I’ll detail which codec does the best job compressing screencams for internet delivery, wh

I recently taught an H.264-specific class at Streaming Media East in New York. Though the class was 3 hours long, I can distill a bunch of useful knowledge into this column if you don’t mind missing the sample videos and example screens, not to mention the insightful and surprisingly compelling lecture. Let’s begin. H.264 is today’s “it” codec because it …

This short (under 10-minute) PowerPoint-based tutorial details how to configure the most important H.264 encoding parameters (profiles, levels, entropy encoding and b-frames), discusses why H.264 encoding quality varies by encoding tool and identif

This is a peer review of streaming video produced by the Wine Library, written as a sidebar to a feature story by StreamingMedia.com. Here's the intro:As you’ve read in Troy Dreier's feature, the Wine Library's producer and star, Gary Vaynerch

When some people get a powerful new computer, they want to produce a new video, play games, or show it off to their friends. I just want to run as many tests as possible to analyze its performance, which I guess means that I’m well suited for this portion of my job description.         This navel-gazing aside, …