Though I spend most of my time focusing on video production and encoding, I’m also fascinated by how organizations are actually using video in their day-to-day operations. So when Vidyard released their second annual Video in Business Benchmark Report (freely downloadable here) I had to give it a quick scan. Briefly, Vidyard is a video…
While at NAB, I produced a short video with Beamr CTO Dror Gil and Dirk Griffioen from Unified Streaming, which sells a variety of streaming-related software, including modules for ABR packaging. The primary topic was encoding and packaging with HEVC in HLS. Dror also gave a brief demo of Beamr’s new Transcoder product. During the talk, we covered…
While at NAB, I freelanced with my iPhone X, a video light, and a handheld microphone and interviewed 14 encoding professionals. These videos are posted on Streaming Media website along with text transcripts. Here are links to and brief descriptions of the interviews: Netflix’s Anne Aaron, on Netflix’s plans for the AV1 codec. AOMedia executive (and…
From a Streaming Media perspective, NAB 2018 was all about the launch of the AV1 codec from the Alliance for Open Media. While at the show, I spoke with many different people from many different companies about the launch, and about other codec-related announcements at the show. You can read all about that in my…
Just a quick note to let you know that I’ll be speaking twice at NAB in Las Vegas next week; once as host of a panel discussion on HEVC and AV1, the other a session on how to use objective quality metrics to assist encoding configurations. Details are below. If you’re at NAB and free,…
With streaming video data rates, less is always more, unless of course, lower data rates mean visible artifacts. I just finished a review of the ZPEG Engine for x264, which produced bitrate savings of 21% without blocks, banding, mosquitoes, or other problems that would be noticeable by typical viewers. This was an average saving; the…
Moscow State University’s Video Quality Measurement Tool was already good. Enhancements in the new version, including new metrics and the ability to run multiple analyses simultaneously, make it even better. Moscow State University’s Video Quality Measurement Tool (VQMT) has always been one of the least expensive and most functional quality measurement tools available. The latest…
Now that programs like Wirecast and vMix make it simple to perform side-by-side interviews like my recent interview with Beamr’s Dror Gill below, I’ve been doing more of them. The tension has always been regarding video quality. Specifically, do I connect a camera to my HP notebook, or go with its internal webcam or my…
The skinny: Apple, a member of the MPEG LA H.264 and HEVC patent pools, and staunch supporter of standards (and avoider of open source-codecs) broke ranks and joined the Alliance for Open Media. Give me more: Apple has always deployed standards-based codecs, and Steve Jobs was very negative on Google’s VP8 open-source codec when launched.…