This post provides an introduction to live streaming, particularly the technologies and services involved in producing, packaging, delivering, and playing live streams. It’s designed to help those new to live streaming to understand what live streaming is and the technological options available for producing it. If you’re new to live streaming and need to get…
This week’s lesson is an updated lesson for my course, Computing and Using Video Quality Metrics: A Course for Encoding Professionals. The agenda is shown in the YouTube frame. The lesson starts with an overview of rate-distortion curves and BD-Rate functions, what they are, and how you create them. Then I get into a pet…
Announcing a free webinar on Thursday, January 28th at 2:00 PM EST. This webinar is designed for Wowza Streaming Engine (WSE) users who are adding digital rights management (DRM) to their live or VOD streams. It provides the technical background to understand how DRM works in the HTML5 environment and which DRM technologies are needed…
When I launched my online course, Streaming Media 101: Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals, one of the first companies that signed on for multiple students was Dolby Laboratories, Inc. Several students came from the Enterprise Encoding division, which is headed by Senior Director David Trescott. This is the group that created the Hybrik encoding…
Adoption of MPEG-2, H.264, and HEVC was almost automatic in some markets because implementors assumed that royalties would be reasonable and that the codecs would succeed. Two factors have changed those assumptions; the HEVC royalty mess and the formation of the Alliance for Open Media. This short video details how these two factors have changed…
COVID-related travel and meeting restrictions don’t obviate the need for employee training. This article documents the four training options available for streaming media professionals from the Streaming Learning Center. I created the Streaming Learning Center to help train streaming media professionals, particularly those involved in encoding, packaging, and delivering streaming video. Initially, we offered books…
Recently I received a short list of compression-related questions from a consulting buddy; he’s always been gracious in answering my questions and I wanted to return the favor. Since he’s asking, I thought others might be curious as well; hence this blog post that largely incorporates my responses to his questions. Here are the questions:…
Pleased to share another five-star review of my online course Streaming Media 101: Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals. As the course tagline details, “This course teaches the fundamentals and skills necessary to succeed in a streaming media-related job, whether you’re producing and distributing streaming media or creating the tools, technologies, and services necessary to…
I’ve spent the last two months testing four AV1 codecs accessible via command-line arguments and I start testing VVC codecs next week. Trying to fairly and accurately test the capabilities of these codecs turned out to be a pretty grueling and messy task. The key challenge, of course, was creating the optimal command string for…
Overview: When measuring video quality with metrics like VMAF you should measure and report consistency (transient quality and standard deviation) as well as mean quality. If you’re interested in the quality consistency of AV1 codecs and typical configuration options, you can attend a webinar ($149) or take a course on AV1 production that I will…