This is one of 42 lessons from my course Video Compression for Web, Disc and PC/TV/Console Playback, on Udemy (bit.ly/Ozer_u). It’s one of the most important lessons, covering bits/pixel, which is a critical concept in streaming. As an informational lesson, this is mostly PowerPoint with audio. Most other lessons include screencam demos of the software or Internet functions being demonstrated.  …

The first reviews of my new video compression course on Udemy are in, and they’re quite positive (of course, otherwise I wouldn’t be blogging about them).  Travis Roesler, owner of howtofightnow.com, a website that offers self defense courses, rated my Udemy course five stars, and commented: Jan REALLY helped me out. I can’t even begin to tell you how much …

All live events start with an encoded stream produced by a live streaming encoder. In this guide, I’ll discuss the categories of live encoding products and identify the factors you should consider when buying an encoder.

Note: With the June 2014 release of iBooks Author, the procedures discussed here no longer work. Good luck with your iBooks Author encodes. Adding video to an iBook is simple; just drag the clip into your book in iBooks Author. But if iBooks Author “optimizes” the video you inserted, it’s encoding it again and potentially boosting the data rate far …

There are many instances where cloud encoding is both efficient and cost-effective. For example, if you’re working with files already saved to the cloud -- perhaps for archival purposes, perhaps because you’re distributing content contrib

So you want to produce a webcast, perhaps for training, marketing, or sales. You envision a presentation involving a talking head video and PowerPoint, and maybe some extras such as chat and Q&A. Price is definitely a consideration, but you also

While few companies of any kind are actually making money from HEVC (H.265) today, the successor to H.264 will become increasingly important during the next 2–3 years, perhaps even earlier in some markets for some producers. So understanding th

So, you’ve decided to stream a live event, and you’re considering your options. You definitely need a streaming server to reach your target viewers. You could buy and install your own server (or rent a cloud instance), but then you’

HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) is a simple and elegant architecture created by Apple for delivering adaptive bit rate streams to iOS devices and compatible browsers, essentially Safari. Since its release, HLS has been incorporated into technologies that e

If you’re just getting into producing files for HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) delivery, you may find my article on encoding for HLS useful. Here’s the introduction: HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) is a simple and elegant architecture created by Apple for delivering adaptive bit rate streams to iOS devices and compatible browsers, essentially Safari. Since its release, HLS has been incorporated …