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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.

AV1 Codec: AOMedia Video 1 Explained

This article on the Wowza website provides a quick overview of the AV1 codec: what it is, how it performs, what it costs, and what it’s good for today. It’s useful if you want to get a quick feel for where AV1 fits in with other codecs. The article is the fourth in a five-part series that covers H.264, VP9, …

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Speech-to-text In Premiere Pro – Fast, Easy, Accurate, and Free

This video tutorial teaches you how to convert speech-to-text in Premiere Pro. I’ve been using Premiere Pro for more years than I care to think about, and most recent new features, as you’d expect with a mature product, are incremental. This new speech-to-text feature is absolutely an exponential addition that’s going to change how we think about captioning and transcribing …

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New Macintosh Lessons Added to Streaming Media 101

Just a quick post to advise potential students that we’ve supplemented the course Streaming Media 101 : Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals with five new Mac-based lessons, which are: Installing and using MediaInfo for the Mac Installing and using MP4 Bitrate Viewer Installing and using Apple’s Advanced Video Quality Tool (AVQT) (Also added to our course on video metrics) …

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H.265 Codec: High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Explained

This article on the Wowza website provides a quick overview of the HEVC codec: what it is, how it performs, what it costs, and what it’s good for. It concludes with a section on what you need to know to effectively deploy the HEVC codec using the Wowza Streaming Engine software. The article is the third in a five-part series …

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Baby Steps with Apple’s Advanced Video Quality Tool and Quality Metric

I’m adding some lessons that identify and describe the operation of Mac video utilities to the online course Streaming Media 101 and took this as an opportunity to have a look at Apple’s Advanced Video Quality Tool  (AVQT) which launched at the company’s 2021 World Wide Developers Conference. I’m making the lesson available as a lesson of the week, immediately …

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MediaInfo and BitRate Viewer – Essential Tools for Video Analysis

Streaming producers need tools to explore different encoding options and verify their work. Here are two free Windows tools that I couldn’t live without. MediaInfo MediaInfo is a video analysis tool that displays the most significant data points regarding a video file, including resolution, data rate, codec, bit depth, frame rate, duration, etc. It’s available for download here, and there …

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Computing Break Even on Codec Deployments

To a great degree, video codec adoption is driven by the simple break-even formula presented above. You put your costs on top, your savings per hour on the bottom, and come up with the number of hours of video you have to distribute to recoup your costs and start hitting the plus column. If you’re in a TL/DR frame of …

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Adobe Premiere Pro Turns 30, Gets Facelift

Premiere Pro is an application that I use almost every day for course production and consulting. I’ve written books about it, created courses, and know every nook and cranny inside and out. After packing all the features one could possibly want into the program, Adobe is “reimagining” the interface to simplify operation for newbies. As I conclude in this article …

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VP9 Codec: Google’s Open-Source Technology Explained

This article on the Wowza website provides a quick overview of the VP9 codec: what it is, how it performs, what it costs, and what it’s good for. It concludes with a section on where you should consider deploying VP9 and what you need to know to effectively deploy the codec. The article is the second in a five-part series …

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H.264 Codec Backgrounder

This article on the Wowza website provides a quick overview of the H.264 codec: what it is, how it performs, what it costs, and what it’s good for. It concludes with a section on what you need to know to effectively deploy the H.264 codec, particularly within the Wowza Streaming Engine software and the Wowza Streaming Cloud service. The article …

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