Just got the press release; No content royalties (H.264 had them for subscriptions and PPV) and max annual royalty quadrupled (more or less) from $6.5 million to $25 million to start. Here’s the pasted bit from the press release: full release attached below. Decoder-Encoder Manufacturer Sublicenses • HEVC products sold by a legal entity to end users   o 0 – …

If your capture frame rate in Wirecast drops into the 10-15 fps range, check the Video Display Rate option in the Preferences dialog. When I started testing this morning after several weeks away from the program, it was set at 60. Unfortunately, that produced capture rates in the 12-15 range, not sufficient for the testing I was doing. Took me …

Multiple websites have reported that Netflix intends to use HEVC to distribute House of Cards in 4K. Even more significantly, they intend to reencode much of their SD and HD content to HEVC to save bandwidth costs and deliver higher quality video over existing connections. This is a significant win for HEVC, and will likely accelerate adoption by the content …

Not quite sure when Adobe added these features, but I was puttering around in Adobe Media Encoder CC last week and noticed that Adobe added the ability to add Lumetri looks, text, graphics and timecode directly in Adobe Media Encoder (AME). In previous versions, you would have had to use Premiere Pro. If you’re working with content you didn’t edit …

My colleague Dan Rayburn at Streaming Media (also a Frost & Sullivan analyst) just released another of his market-defining blog posts, entitled “The Dirty Little Secret About 4K Streaming: Content Owners Can’t Afford The Bandwidth Costs.” As the title suggests, after speaking with content producers before and during CES, Rayburn that few video distributors other than subscription services can afford …

Like most compression geeks, I’m a big fan of the x264 codec, which is widely considered the highest quality H.264 codec, winning the prestigious University of Moscow codec shootout year after year. Though the codec has a comprehensive range of configuration options, I recommend that most users simply choose a preset and let it go at that-no tinkering required (as …

When YouTube sneezes, the codec world catches the ‘flu, even if the cause of the sneeze was totally innocuous. So it was with YouTube’s announcement that they will show 4K video encoded with VP9 at CES with hardware partners including Sony, Intel and many others. From the coverage in the press, which extended all the way to CNN, you would …

No, it’s not one of my webinars, it’s from Unbounce, a company that helps marketers create landing pages for products, sevices and the like. Two things are cool about this webinar. First, if you’re a video producer, you have to be excited about ways video can help your company market your products and services. Second, they practice what they preach, …

On January 6, 2014, HP announced a new version of their Z1 all-in-one workstation. I love the first version because it’s beautiful, powerful and field upgradeable; but it lacked high-speed external connectivity, so your capture options for live production were limited. You can see my experience with the unit here and my colleague Tim Siglin’s review of the Z1 here. …

Compressor 4.1 is the first major update to Compressor since well before Final Cut Pro X. I reviewed the software for Streaming Media Magazine, and found a great new interface, the same old plumbing and confusing operation; here’s the pithy close: To close, let me say that 95% of Compressor users likely encode at data rates high enough to eliminate …