We’ve known Beamr as an optimization company, and in 2016 they bought Vanguard Video, a codec company. Traditionally, Beamr sold SDKs to large customers, but now they’re launching a cloud transcoding service. I recently interviewed CTO Dror Gill about the new service; here’s the video.

The graph below shows two off-the-shelf players retrieving the same HLS manifest under the similar test conditions, which vary from 512 kbps at the low end to 5120 kbps at the top end. On the left, Player A, stopped retrieving video multiple times during the low bandwidth transmissions, stalling playback, which are the red lines at the bottom of the …

As recently as June, HEVC seemed to have more momentum than the Golden State Warriors and New England Patriots combined, courtesy of Apple’s adding HEVC to HLS. Then, in the span of 30 days in January, the balloon popped as a trio of seismically negative events cast a dark shadow on HEVC’s future relevance and potential financial success. Et Tu, …

According to Moscow State University (MSU), AV1 is the highest quality codec available, besting both HEVC and VP9—when considering quality only, and not encoding speed,. More interesting is that in normal operating modes, VP9 produced higher quality than HEVC. These are just two of several compelling findings from the recently completed MSU 2017 Codec Comparison Report. As you’ll read below, …

Wowza ClearCaster is a $6,000 encoder from Wowza, that at first glance may cause you to repeat the company’s name loudly, as in, “Wowza, that’s a high price for a single channel streaming appliance.” Perhaps so, but it’s the only encoder that can stream 1080p to Facebook Live, and as I learned when I reviewed the product, it has great …

The creativity behind immersive VR filmmaking is only matched by the software engineering creativity that makes this type of video possible. I just started a consulting project relating to 360° VR video, and have some introductory conclusions. I am only an egg, as Robert Heinlein might say, but I thought I would share them. First, done right, VR can be …

I’ve resisted upgrading to the latest version of Adobe Creative Cloud because the beloved titler has been replaced (but is still available). After producing a video tutorial on the new title function for Streaming Media Producer, I see that Adobe made a great decision; the new tool is both more capable and more accessible. The video is presented here; you …

It took awhile, but the first review of my book, Learn to Produce Videos with FFmpeg: In Thirty Minutes or Less, is up on Amazon. Here’s the key comment. “Everything here is already available on the net. But this is much easier. Worth the price just to have it all in one place. Easy to read and understand. Does not go …

Interested in how Apple’s adding HEVC to HLS is impacting streaming producer’s intent to start encoding with HEVC? How about their attitudes towards the Alliance for Open Media’s AV1 codec? A new report available on the Streaming Media website covers both of these issues and more. Entitled, The Impact of Apple’s HEVC Adoption: A Survey-Based Report, the report asks how quickly the …

The skinny: Apple, a member of the MPEG LA H.264 and HEVC patent pools, and staunch supporter of standards (and avoider of open source-codecs) broke ranks and joined the Alliance for Open Media. Give me more: Apple has always deployed standards-based codecs, and Steve Jobs was very negative on Google’s VP8 open-source codec when launched. Alliance for Open Media (AOM) …