I’m pulling together some materials for my pre-conference session at Streaming Media West (November 18-20 in Los Angeles) entitled Objective Quality Metrics 2D & 3D: What They Are, How To Compute Them, & How To Use Them. One lesson talks about “tuning” when encoding files to be measured with metrics like PSNR, VMAF, and SSIM. It’s a crucial issue to …

Ideahub and Helios Streaming LLC have sued three streaming publishers, Showtime, Vudu, and Crackle (and other Sony Properties), for infringing upon a set of DASH patents. The suits, all filed in Federal District Court in Delaware, came within days after MPEG LA seemingly shuttered its DASH Patent Pool, which now states, “The DASH Patent Portfolio License is no longer offered to …

According to Bitmovin’s “Video Developer Report 2019,” latency was a concern of 54% of all its survey participants. Digging into the numbers, subsequent questions revealed that almost 50% of survey participants planned to implement a low-latency technology over the next 1–2 years, with over 50% seeking latency of under 5 seconds and 30% seeking latency of under 1 second (See …

So, the object of the exercise is a single FFmpeg script that encodes your files and creates the necessary master and media playlists. I took an initial stab here, but wound up with a script, “as ugly as someone else’s baby, particularly the need to duplicate the input file four times for the four streams.” Again through the hard work …

I’m pulling together some materials for my pre-conference session at Streaming Media West (November 18-20 in Los Angeles) entitled Introduction to ABR Production and Delivery. One lesson shows the technology ecosystem needed to implement OTT streaming and identifies key vendors for each function. I figured I’d throw these slides out there to get comments on the topics covered (and not …

Reviewer Ian Kennedy recently reviewed Learn to Produce Video with FFmpeg on Amazon, and he hit the nail on the head in his five-star review, saying: Who this book is for: 1) The decision maker who may be skeptical about using FFmpeg in a production environment compared to a turn-key commercial solution. 2) The video-adjacent engineer who has been asked …

So, there I was downloading videos from YouTube to include in a PowerPoint for a training course I was producing. Unfortunately, my download tool, wondershare’s excellent video converter, downloaded separate audio and video streams, the video in an MP4 wrapper and the audio as an MP3 file. So I had to mux the two to input them into PowerPoint. A …

All codecs and encoding tools have a configuration option that controls the quality/encoding time tradeoff. With x264 (and x265) the preset controls that tradeoff. When choosing a preset you should consider 3 criteria: Overall quality – the overall quality produced by that preset Low frame quality – the quality of the lowest frame produced by that preset, which indicates the …

Streaming Media West is coming up next month in the City of Los Angeles (as opposed to Huntington Beach where it’s been the last few years). Specifically, it’s at the Westin Bonaventure on November 19-20 (Tuesday/Wednesday) with pre-conference sessions on Monday the 18th. I’ll be my normal busy self with two pre-conference sessions and several presentations. Here are the dates, …

Many producers distribute the same encoding ladder to all viewers. However, sending a 1080p stream to smartphone viewers may be a waste of bandwidth as both SSIMPLUS and VMAF scores reveal that lower resolution, lower-bandwidth videos deliver similar quality at a lower cost. This tutorial, from my course Computing and Using Video Quality Metrics, shows you the tests I performed …