On February 2, online event producer INXPO published a question and answer session regarding my new book, Video Encoding by the Numbers. The session included six questions, ranging from, “how did you get into writing a book on compression?” to “who is this book for?” The most revealing question was, “what’s different from other books on streaming production?” Here’s the …

Apple Safari has never supported VP8 or VP9, but a move by Google’s YouTube pressures it to do so: Safari users can’t see new 4K videos on YouTube. Apple Safari is the only current browser that doesn’t support Google’s VP9. In a move that may go a long way towards convincing Apple to do so, YouTube has stopped encoding 4K …

First Amazon book review is out from technologist Douglas Dixon, who blogs at the Manifest Tech Blog. I love the title of the review, Ozer Transforms Video Compression from Alchemy to Science, because it captures exactly what I tried to do in the book. Here’s a snippet from the middle of the review. First, Ozer covers the basics of video …

I spent a lot of time late last fall looking at Facebook Live, trying to understand who was using it and why, and which tools they used. This effort culminated in three resources available now on the Streaming Media website.  Here’s the main article entitled Facebook Live: A Progress Report After One Year of Growth. The intro, copied below, describes …

How are organizations such as PBS and TechCrunch using Facebook Live to reach and grow their audiences? The platform has been with us for a year now, so it’s time to check in. We’ve all known for a while that you can stream live video to Facebook Pages. While the technical side is interesting, the big questions on our minds …

(Note: This article was amended to show the comparative results at 6 mbps) Summary (The MPD) As more and more producers move their encoding to the cloud, or distributing via OVPs or other service providers, the data rate for the mezzanine files is significant factor for upload time and bandwidth and storage costs. The big question is, how much extra …

We spoke with 15 publishers including PBS, The YES Network, and TechCrunch to find out exactly how they’re broadcasting to Facebook Live, and the technology they’re using to do it. For our article “Facebook Live: A Progress Report After One Year of Growth,” we interviewed 15 video publishers to get a sense of the strategic reasons why they’re webcasting on …

N2224 has long been considered the Rosetta Stone of ABR encoding (image courtesy of Beamr). Apple TN2224 was originally posted in March 2010 to provide direction for streaming producers encoding for delivery to iOS devices via HTTP Live Streaming (HLS). Because the document was so comprehensive and well thought out, and HLS became so successful, TN2224 has often been thought of …

I spoke at Streaming Media West on three topics, the first a 3-hour workshop which was not recorded, and two one-hour sessions that were. The PDFs used in the presentations have been available for awhile; I just added the videos from the two sessions. Here are the links. Workshop – Encoding 2016: Codecs and Packaging for PCs, Mobile and OTT/STB/Smart …

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 …