YouTube encodes some videos using the AV1 and VP9 codecs. This post identifies the H.264 versions also created by YouTube for devices incompatible with VP9/AV1 for 1080p and larger videos.  In a recent post, I explored which codecs YouTube used for videos ranging from a few hundred views to a few million. The conclusion was H.264 for videos with a …

This article is derived from a lesson in Streaming Media 101: Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals. If you’re looking for an efficient way to get up to speed on key streaming terms, technologies, workflows, and best practices, check out the course here.  Companies distribute videos for a myriad of reasons; sometimes as the product, sometimes to sell or market …

Here’s the webinar; links to the handouts are below the video window. Thanks to Corey, Anthony, and John for pulling together the information and delivering three great presentations. Corey’s handout here: Anthony’s handout here: John’s handout here: Here’s the description: Remote production became a “thing” during the pandemic and it will remain a thing going forward. But what precisely is …

Author’s Note (March 15, 2022): A colleague recently advised me that YouTube was now encoding all videos into VP9 format. A quick check revealed that he was correct; literally every video that I checked, including some uploaded back in 2010, was encoded into VP9 as well as H.264. What’s interesting is that many low-volume videos, like this one with 118 …

Contribute to the one of the most valuable sources of industry data by completing the Bitmovin Video Developer Survey.  One of the most important information sources that I’ve come to rely upon is the Bitmovin Video Developer Report (2020, 2019, 2018, 2017). I’ve covered it for Streaming Media multiple times (see here) and refer to its findings frequently in my …

Author’s note: After completing this long and arduous post, Apple sent a note that I was interpolating their scores incorrectly, leading to more analysis shown as an addendum below.  What: This article compares Apple’s AVQT metric to VMAF and SSIMWAVE’s SSIMPLUS metrics, with very limited subjective testing from Subjectify.us. The testing was extremely limited as are the conclusions you should …

The H.264 codec is still the most widely used video compression technology — aka codec in the world and likely will be for the next few years. For this reason, every streaming media professional should know what the H.264 codec is and how to encode with H.264. This beginner’s guide to encoding H.264 will describe what H.264 is, detail the …

I’m appearing on a panel next week at the SPIE Optics and Photonics Conference entitled Advanced Video Compression and Applications with a host of encoding luminaries. The panel will be streamed on August 3, 2021, at 3:30 PM PDT, but only registered guests can watch the Zoom feed (you can register here). The discussion will then be made available on YouTube …

In the first article in this series, Baby Steps with Apple’s Advanced Video Quality Tool and Quality Metric, I detailed what Apple’s Advanced Video Quality Tool (AVQT) is and how to use it. In this article, I tested multiple video files with Apple AVQT and describe my user experience. In the next article, I’ll review how AVQT scoring compares to …

This article is derived from a lesson in Streaming Media 101: Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals. If you’re looking for an efficient way to get up to speed on key streaming terms, technologies, workflows, and best practices, check out the course here.  Every time you encode a video file with a distribution-oriented codec like H.264, HEVC, VP9, or AV1, …