Articles

If you haven’t been watching the live titling space, you’ve missed the NDI revolution, and your productions may be falling behind in terms of graphics quality. In this article I’ll explain what NDI is and how it works, and I’ll explore how it enhances the titling capabilities of the NewTek TriCaster, Telestream Wirecast, and vMix GO. I’ll also look at …

The move away from plugins like Flash and Silverlight has made video delivery easier, but it’s also made DRM more complicated. Here’s what DRM looks like today, along with a discussion of the leading DRM technologies and DRM service providers. If you plan to distribute premium content from the major U.S. studios, you’ll need to encrypt that content, which typically …

Every compressed file involves dozens of configuration-related decisions, including resolution, data rate, H.264 profile, VBR or CBR, entropy coding technique, x.264 preset, b-frames, reference frames—the list goes on and on. Most encoding prof

Publishers and encoding companies alike are beginning to embrace VP9, Google’s open source codec. Here’s how it stacks up on quality and data rates. The value proposition for VP9 is clear, as stated in Figure 1: “Adaptive HD streaming with 1/2 the data of H.264!” Half the data rate cuts your bandwidth and storage costs and allows you to reach …

London-based V-Nova has made some impressive claims about Perseus, its compression technology. Streaming Media’s preliminary testing shows that it lives up to some of them. V-Nova launched its compression technology, Perseus, on April Fools’ Day 2015, claiming “2x–3x average compression gains, at all quality levels, under practical real-time operating scenarios versus H.264, HEVC and JPEG2000.” The timing and the claims …

Netflix announced the open-source availability of the Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion, which it’s now using instead of PSNR to analyze the quality of transcodes in its vast catalog. Yesterday, Netflix announced the open-source availability of its new video quality metric, the Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion (VMAF) in a long, explanatory blog post. Netflix uses the metric now, and it appears …

Scheduled to be the first codec released by the Alliance for Open Media, AV1 is positioned to replace VP9 and compete with HEVC. While we don’t know many details yet, the backing of the Alliance should give AV1 a significant competitive advantage. The AV1 codec will be the first codec released by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), and it’s …

Click below to download the presentation or to view the conference video. Here’s the description.  Choosing the number of streams in an adaptive group and configuring them is usually a subjective, touchy-feely exercise, with no way to really gauge the effectiveness and efficiency of the streams. However, by measuring stream quality via metrics such as PSNR, SSIM, and VQM, you …

[Author’s note: Video from the session is available below, as is the presentation.] The two biggest pricing mistakes you can make is to assume that the market has no alternative, and that you don’t have to get it right the first time. HEVC Advance in particular, and the HEVC IP ownership group in general, who still haven’t come together with …

Click below to download the handout. Here’s the description. As video resolutions increase and target playback platforms multiply, video producers must leave their H.264/HLS/HDS comfort zone and expand into HEVC, VP9, and MPEG-DASH. This workshop is divided into multiple segments by target platform to teach you the applicable standards and best strategies for delivering live and VOD adaptive video to …