Articles

Adaptive streaming is a hot topic for most streaming producers. If you produce your files with Adobe Media Encoder, you should know that Adobe has provided seven downloadable presets that you can use as a starting point. Click here to go to the download page.   You install the presets by manually copying them into your presets folder (a PDF …

If you’re producing DVDs or Blu-ray discs with Adobe Encore, you probably know that you can easily convert the authored DVD to a Flash project that you can upload to a web site. If you don’t know, or if you don’t work with Adobe Encore, read on – you might find a very useful technique for getting client approvals or …

I recently was producing some files for a client in Sorenson Squeeze, and saw some funky differences in exposure and contrast when previewing my work in QuickTime Player and other players. I produced this file at 1280×720, so feel free to zoom out to full screen to watch this video.

ScribeMedia.org produced a number of video interviews at StreamingMedia West, including an interview with StreamingLearning Center’s founding visionary, Jan Ozer (sorry, couldn’t resist, writing in the third party is so freeing). As the title suggests, host Peter Cervieri and I discuss WebM, HTML5 and several other issues. Interestingly, the interview was shot with a single HD camera, and the ScribeMedia …

So, there I was, shooting a video for a Peer Review for StreamingMedia.com. If you’re not familiar with these videos, it’s where I critique videos presented by different web sites. While I simply don’t have the production facilities to match the quality of some of the sites that I comment on, I do try to maximize the quality of my …

HP invited a bunch of journalists, myself included, out to visit their facility in Fort Collins, CO, the headquarters for workstation design, support and marketing. Beyond the desire to meet and greet friends old and new, I had one goal – to learn what makes a computer a workstation. To explain, in the bad old days, workstations had proprietary RISC …

Here’s the description of the presentation that I just gave at StreamingMedia West. You can download the PDF below. Enjoy! This seminar focuses on producing H.264 video  for streaming or progressive download. It starts with a deep look at key H.264 encoding parameters like B-frames, profiles, and levels and how to customize encoding parameters for distributing via QuickTime and Flash. …

I just finished my H.264 vs. WebM Bakeoff presentation – you can download the PDF below. You’ve heard the hype about VP8, but how does it really compare to H.264? This session compares quality, encoding speed, and playback requirements. It also details access to VP8 encoding from within live and on-demand encoding tools, the availability of hardware playback acceleration, and …

Microsoft Silverlight has been very noticably used by NBC (Olympics/Sunday Night Football), but never achieved the penetration necessary for smaller businesses to adopt it. The thing is, while the sizzle behind Silverlight has always been video (as with Flash), the steak has always been Rich Internet Applications, and more specifically, the tools that developers use to build them. In my …

I gave two presentations at Streaming Media Europe last week, one a three hour presentation on producing H.264 for Flash, Silverlight, QuickTime and HTML5, the other a 30 minute short course on producing H.264. Both presentations are attached hereto. Here’s the agenda from the longer presentation. Most notable are new performance stats that I collected for H.264 playback on files …