I’ve been tracking CMSD-MQA for a while now. Briefly, Common Media Server Data for Media Quality Assessment (CMSD-MQA) is a draft SVTA standard that defines how video quality scores like VMAF, PSNR, and SSIM, generated at the encoder, can be carried downstream through the delivery chain as standardized metadata, giving packagers, origin shields, and monitoring systems actionable quality information without …

On March 24, 2026, Dolby sued Snap Inc. (Snapchat) for AV1 and HEVC patent infringement in the United States and Brazil. The suits are the first AV1 assertion against a streaming platform by an Access Advance licensor, and Dolby is seeking injunctive relief in both countries. The reason this matters beyond Snap is a single legal fact: Dolby is asserting …

I recently interviewed Damien Sterkers, VP of Products and Solutions Marketing at Broadpeak, to discuss the company’s new multiview solution for live streaming. Briefly, Broadpeak has developed an innovative server-side approach that delivers the best of both worlds: the universal device compatibility of server-side multiview without the massive encoding costs that approach typically requires. You can watch the video on …

For most of the live encoding era, the operator’s main job was picking a bitrate. You’d set a target, the encoder would hit it, and quality was whatever came out the other end. Simple content looked great. Complex content looked terrible. The encoder didn’t care because you told it to deliver bits, not quality. Then came a generation of smarter …

Contextual advertising matches ads to content rather than to people. The logic is straightforward: a viewer watching content about home renovation is likely receptive to a Home Depot ad at that moment, whereas a behavioral retarget from last week’s browsing is not. The problem is that behavioral targeting depends on third-party data that is becoming increasingly unavailable as privacy regulation …

I recently consulted with a company that was running capped CRF-type encoding across four codecs simultaneously: x264, VP9, NVIDIA H.264, and NVIDIA AV1. The first two were VOD encoding, the second two live. I was genuinely impressed by the sophistication and practicality of this video engineering setup, so I asked the client if I could share what they were doing. …

On February 12, I interviewed David Ronca, formerly of Netflix and Meta, now RoncaTech, about the latest Beta version of his Video Codec Acid Test, or VCAT, which now includes VVC decode courtesy of Fraunhofer’s open-source VVeC decoder. The interview is available here on YouTube. Here’s an overview of the highlights we covered, with timestamps for the video. To get …

When a codec researcher declares that a newer codec is up to 40% more efficient than the baseline codec, they are making a highly accurate, well-defined claim. However, much like the EPA fuel economy ratings on a new car’s window sticker, these white papers should include a disclaimer stating, “actual bandwidth savings almost certainly will vary.” Given that bandwidth savings …

The marketing story around vibe coding is awe-inspiring: a non‑programmer can describe any app they can imagine, and AI will do all the hard work. No code, no problem. Just vibes. It turns out I was vibe coding before I ever heard the term. My goals were both less and more ambitious. Less ambitious, because I wasn’t trying to build …

Before comparing your existing H.264 encodes to HEVC, AV1, or any other advanced codec, you need a baseline you can trust. In practice, many codec efficiency claims collapse once you examine how inefficient the underlying H.264 ladder actually is. This article focuses on fixing that baseline before any codec comparison begins. Let’s take a step back. This is the second …