I’m proud to announce my latest book, Video Encoding by the Numbers, Eliminate the Guesswork from your Streaming Video, which is available now on Amazon. You can read all about the book by clicking here, or click here for a detailed table of contents.  Briefly, after introductory chapters get you up to speed and familiar with objective quality metrics, the next chapters …

If Nokia’s standards infringement lawsuit prevails over Apple, the costs could be steep to any company relying on H.264 or even HEVC. Here are the issues at stake. On December 21, 2016, Nokia sued Apple for infringing eight patents related to H.264 encoding and decoding. By its terms, the complaint makes clear that Apple’s usage of H.264 is generic, and …

MPEG LA’s recent announcement of a DASH royalty pool is the first such royalty on free internet video. And this is only the beginning. We’ve all had time to reflect upon MPEG LA’s announcement of a DASH royalty pool. In my case, it led to the realization that this is the first royalty on free internet video and that things …

Many companies spend too much on adaptive bitrate encoding. In turns out there’s a pricey way to go about it and a cheaper way. Dynamic packaging to the rescue! Let me throw a couple of numbers at you. The first is shown in Figure 1, from Encoding.com’s “Global Media Format Report 2016,” which shows the respective share of the adaptive …

HEVC Advance says it hopes to speed the adoption of HEVC decoders among the installed base of computers and devices by making some software downloads royalty free Seeking to accelerate HEVC deployment to the installed base of computers and mobile devices, HEVC Advance announced this morning that it will seek no royalty on some classes of application software with HEVC …

Streaming Learning Center’s Jan Ozer makes the case for custom, per-title encoding on the Netflix model, focusing on resolution issues in part 1 of this 2-part series from his Streaming Media West presentation. Following the model established by Netflix in December 2015, Jan Ozer argues against content providers applying a standard encoding ladder to all of their content because of …

Streaming Learning Center’s Jan Ozer makes the case for custom, per-title encoding on the Netflix model, focusing on bitrate issues in part 1 of this 2-part series from his Streaming Media West presentation. Following the model established by Netflix in December 2015, Jan Ozer argues against content providers applying a standard encoding ladder to all of their content because of …

The Common Media Application Format (CMAF) hits a predictable roadblock with encryption, where it enables two incompatible modes. This has one columnist feeling pessimistic. One of the Greek philosopher Zeno’s most famous paradoxes is the Dichotomy Paradox, also called the Infinite Halfway Theory. The concept states that if you keep getting halfway to a certain goal, you never arrive, because …

Here’s the session description; click below to download the handout and watch the session. Almost all of the commercial cloud encoding services, and many of the largest streaming producers encode in the cloud using FFmpeg. It’s cheap, relatively simple, and highly effective. To accomplish this yourself, you need two basic skill sets; first how to encode with FFmpeg, and then …

Here’s the session description; scroll down to download the handout and watch the video. Choosing the number of streams in an adaptive group and configuring them is usually a subjective, touchy-feely exercise, with no way to gauge the effectiveness and efficiency of the streams. However, by measuring stream quality via metrics such as PSNR, SSIM, and VQM, you can precisely …