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 …

I’ve launched a new course entitled Introduction To Streaming Media for Non-Technical Staff. As the name suggests, the course introduces non-technical employees to fundamental concepts of streaming media. The basic concept is that even if you’re not an engineer, you should know what a codec is, why H.264 is still king, what DRM is (and why we need it), what …

Moscow State University’s Video Quality Measurement Tool (MSU VQMT) is my go-to utility for computing and visualizing objective metrics like VMAF, PSNR, and SSIM. In version 13, MSU increased codec compatibility and metric performance, added new HDR metrics and display capabilities, and enhanced VQMT’s already best-in-class visualization tools. If you’re a VQMT user, it’s an essential upgrade. If you’re not, …

Every year around this time, like an early Christmas present, Bitmovin releases its Annual Video Developer’s Report, a must-read for all streaming media professionals. Now in its fifth year, the report contains valuable insights regarding codec usage, production workflows, and the issues that are keeping streaming professionals up at night, literally or metaphorically. To produce the report, Bitmovin surveyed 538 …