AV1 has been all consuming from a mindshare perspective for many streaming professionals, but the fact of the matter is that unless you’re distributing stream quantities on par with Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, and Hulu, AV1 won’t be relevant for at least two years, maybe longer. I discuss why in my Streaming Media article, Return of the Codec Wars: A New Hope—a …

If you’ve been following my work, you know that I’m very bullish on per-title encoding and optimization technologies, and have reviewed them several times. One technology that I haven’t tested before is from Crunch Media Works, which offers video optimization tools that can be used on public and private computer servers, as well as mobile devices, to reduce the bandwidth …

If you’re trying to load AVCHD files into Premiere Pro and you’re on Windows 7 or earlier, the AVCHD video will likely load without the audio file. That’s because instead of supporting Dolby decoding natively in Premiere Pro, like they used to, Adobe now piggybacks off the operating support in Windows 8 and beyond. Since Windows 7 doesn’t support Dolby …

Most of the x264 commands that I use in FFmeg are simple and well documented. Today, I had to duplicate a Handbrake preset that included some obscure x264-specific configuration options like the following: cabac=0:aq-mode=3:slices=24:direct=auto:subme=8:trellis=1:deblock=-2,-1:me=umh Cabac, I got, but most of the rest I use the default setting for the selected preset. Since Handbrake was displaying x264 commands which are different …

A recent report published by Unisphere Research and Streaming Media magazine, and sponsored by Beamr, reveals some interesting data on HEVC adoption. Entitled Real-World HEVC Insights: Adoption, Implications, and Workflows, the report is available for free download on StreamingMedia.com (registration required) and is authored by my colleague Tim Siglin, a Streaming Media contributing editor and founding executive director of the …

A recent article in IPWatchdog analyzed HEVC-related patent ownership and found that “only one-third of relevant patents have been declared in patent pools.” So, even companies that license from all three pools are at substantial risk of challenges from other IP owners. With a new standard coming, MPEG needs to update its licensing policies, not its technology. The article was …

One visual quality metric that’s getting a bit more love lately is the Structured Similarity Index (SSIM). For example, when Facebook launched their first VR Metric, SSIM360, they based it on SSIM. I’ve generally avoided using SSIM because the scoring range is too small for my liking (0 – 1) and I wasn’t aware of any way to map SSIM scores …

The internet is full of free FFmpeg documentation. Why should you pay $34.95 for my book (or $29.95 for the PDF)? Because it will help you get your work done fast and get it right the first time. This book eliminates the time you’d spend hunting for answers on Superuser or Stack Overflow and teaches you to make informed encoding decisions …

For all talk about the new AV1 codec or HEVC in HLS, the simplest and fastest way to save bandwidth costs and improve your viewer’s QoE is to deploy video optimization or per-title encoding. I explore why in a column now up on StreamingMedia.com. You can implement a simple form of per-title encoding with FFmpeg using Capped CRF (for Constant …

At NAB 2018 I gave a talk on applying quality metrics to 2D and VR video, and the video has just become available. So here’s the session description, and the video and a link to the handout is below. Choosing the number of streams in an adaptive group and configuring them is usually a subjective, touchy-feely exercise, with no way …