My course, Video Compression for Web, Disc and PC/TV/Console Playback, is an entry-level video compression course designed to help newbies quickly get up to speed on compression technologies and producing for the various platforms listed in the title. It now has 119 students, the latest of which, Ian Carpenter, shared his thoughts in this five star review.  Jan’s knowledge of …

It’s personally gratifying that readers continue to find my book, Producing Streaming Video for Multiple Screen Delivery, useful. Here are comments from the latest five-star review.  I was assigned a Video Conversion and Compression project at work, and I began to look for a good source of information on the subject. I’m glad that I found this book, because it …

In this article I test several microphones for use with an iPhone 6 with applications like FaceTime, Skype and Google Hangouts. The basic workflow is the same. I connected the microhones to my iPhone 6, then opened a Google Hangouts chat with my MacBook Pro, then captured the audio using Camtasia. These audio files will sound worse than the audio …

As I’ve observed previously, one of the benefits I get speaking before technical audiences is to hear their insites and experiences. I learned two very valuable nuggets of information from my most recent talk with the VideoTLV group in Tel Aviv.  The first related to the benefit of encoding H.264 and WebM files when creating a single file experience to …

I’m presenting on multiple screen delivery at the VideoTLV group tonight (February 4, 2015) in Tel Aviv. A download link to the handout is provided below. 

So, YouTube finally went HTML5 first with Flash Fallback, triggering another round of Flash is Dead articles. Hey, didn’t Flash die when Apple shipped the iPad without it? I remember reading lots of articles back then telling me it was so. Well, in truth, it’s a lot truer now, but don’t send flowers to Adobe quite yet, as Flash will …

Sorry for the late notice, the webinar is at 2:00 PM EST, January 28, 2015, and is sponsored by OnStream. Sign up and you’ll get pinged when the archived version is available. Click here to register. Here’s the description: Most streaming producers must distribute to three sets of screens: desktop, mobile, and TV. There are multiple technologies for doing so, including …

I recently finished evaluating Beamr Video. The evaluation included analyzing the quality of the resulting clips using objective measures such as PSNR, SSIM and VQM, and conducting extensive viewing of the optimized clips, assessing their subjective quality compared to the original clips. Following this evaluation, I concluded that “for 99.99% of the expert and average viewers, the Beamr-processed clips would …

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is in a state of flux and will change dramatically over the next 12 – 18 months. This introductory-level article explains what DRM is, why it’s important, how it works now, and the upcoming changes to the Media Source Extensions (MSE) and Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). This story appears on the Jan/Febuary issue of Streaming Media …

While HEVC is getting most of the buzz surrounding Ultra High Definition (UHD) codecs, it plays in exactly zero browsers at this point, while VP9 plays in 60% of the available browsers. In tests I performed for my sessions at Streaming Media West, VP9 delivered better quality than HEVC at similar encoding parameters. So why isn’t VP9 getting the respect …