Most streaming producers adopted HLS and DASH without any concern about intellectual property issues. Though MPEG LA formed a DASH Pool in 2015 it seemed to have died a quiet death in August 2019. Now one of the pool members, Helios Digital, is suing Crackle, Vudu, and Showtime Digital for infringing their DASH patents. As I state in my article …

A student of one of my courses recently asked, “I need a tool, which does the same job as BitrateViewer but for HEVC. Which tool do you use when you need to get some sort of a plot or just a list of bitrates per each second?” Great question. If you don’t know Bitrate Viewer, it’s a great way to …

I had a 45-minute session at Streaming Media West 2019 entitled HOW-TO: Fine-Tuning Your Encoding With Objective Quality Metrics You can download the handout here. This version is about 200 MB because it contains three video demonstrations of the SSIMPLUS VOD Monitor and several other videos, but you’ll need Flash installed to run them (it’s PowerPoint, not me). You can …

A colleague asked for some resources relating to VMAF. Rather than answer in an email I thought I would create a post around it. Some of these are from Netflix, most from me (Jan Ozer). I’ve broken the items into three groups; Computing VMAF, Using VMAF, and About VMAF. I hope you find this collection useful. Computing VMAF My default way …

Versatile Video Coding (VVC) is a codec “drafted by a joint collaborative team of ITU-T and ISO/IEC experts known as the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET), which is a partnership of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG),” as MPEG explains. The codec is designed to meet upcoming needs in videoconferencing, OTT streaming, mobile telephony, …

My article, What is VVC, just published on Streaming Media. Briefly, VVC is “codec next” from the perspective of MPEG (see image above) that’s due out in mid-to-late 2020. The Streaming Media article identifies the new “tools” in the codec, early performance results, and what we know about licensing. It’s way too early for most producers to start thinking about …

My article, The State of CMAF: The Holy Grail or Just Another Format?, just published on the Streaming Media website. Here’s the enticing intro: The holy grail of streaming is a single set of files that you can safely deliver to all target endpoints. The most likely candidate to help achieve this is the Common Media Application Format (CMAF). While …

The Voronoi omnidirectional video metrics have the best correlation between test scores and subjective ratings than all measured 2D and 3D metrics according to its inventors. It’s an open-source metric you can download and learn to use below. I’ll be discussing the Voronoi metric in my upcoming talk on 2D and 3D video quality metrics at Streaming Media West and …

Author’s note: When this post was written, the Zeranoe FFmpeg Windows download didn’t include VMAF, so you had to either download this version or compile your own. Now the Zeranoe version does include VMAF support; all you need to do is download the models and run the correct command strings. To learn how to do this, check out the blog …

This blog identifies six incredibly useful FFmpeg commands for transmuxing, extracting audio/video, converting to YUV/Y4M, and scaling to different resolutions. All commands are included in my book, Learn to Produce Videos with FFmpeg In 30 Minutes or Less ($34.95), and course, FFmpeg for Adaptive Bitrate Production ($29.95)  (which includes a PDF copy of the book). Don’t just learn FFmpeg; become an …