Note to reader: Much, but not all of this book has been superceded by Jan Ozer’s new book, Video Encoding by the Numbers:Eliminate the Guesswork from Your Streaming Video (2017). Specifically, the new book deeply examines encoding parameters for H.264, VP9, and HEVC, as well as ABR streaming in HLS and DASH formats. However, the new book does not cover …

Small and affordable, the VidiU lets broadcasters stream HD from anywhere. But, one flaw keeps us from calling it a must-buy

In March, I visited Moscow to speak at the Connected TV Forum. The trip was sponsored by NGENIX, the leading regional CDN in Russia and CIS, and their CEO, Konstantin Chumachenko, was the first to reach out. My talk, Producing for Multiple Screen Delivery (and you can download the handouts here), was formulated with the help of Konstantin and conference …

H.265/High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the successor codec to H.264, which, like H.264, is jointly developed by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group and ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG). The primary goal of the new codec is 50 percen

There’s been a lot of back and forth about how Final Cut Pro X (FCPX) has been accepted in the marketplace. Before its introduction, though Adobe had been making headway against Final Cut Pro 7 (FCP7), it’s fair to say that FCP7 had greater mindshare in the educational and professional educational community. My own informal discussions with many educators and …

Is it just me, or is there nothing more stupid in the world than Linked-in Endorsements? I got another this morning, from one of the hundreds of LinkIn connections who I only tangentially know, and who I have never produced work for in the field that he endorsed me in. Hootie-Hoo, those consulting dollars are going to fly in now. …

HTML5 video is all the rage, but if your viewer's browser isn't HTML5-compatible, the video won't play unless you fallback to Flash or similar technology. I'm working on a new book and wanted to determine the percentage of desktop browsers that are H

I created this short video to illustrate how streaming is more efficient than delivering via progressive download. For illustrating the efficiencies of streaming, I used a file streamed via RTMP, but you can get the same benefit via chunk-based HTTP based technologies like HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), Smooth Streaming, HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS), or DASH, when it becomes available. I …

I recently taught several seminars on producing video for HTML5, and I started my preparation with some research to see how the WebM codec was being used to determine the focus and scope of my WebM-related materials. In case you’ve forgotten &m

First, video compression is a garbage in/garbage out medium, so output quality improves with input quality. Second, codecs such as H.264 are lossy, which means the lower the data rate, the lower the quality. Finally, intermediate formats such as ProR