This article details how Brazilian OTT operator Telecine deployed MediaMelon SmartPlay and decreased bandwidth costs by about 42% while improving the MOS quality of the video delivered. SmartPlay also helped Telecine manage the 4X increase in demand due to COVID-19. This is the third and final story about MediaMelon SmartPlay. The first article describes how…
In the previous post, I described what MediaMelon SmartPlay is and identified some of the benefits. In this post, I’ll discuss pricing and how to integrate SmartPlay into your encoding, delivery, and playback infrastructure. Pricing Overview Let’s briefly discuss the SmartPlay pricing model here and look at ROI at the end of this document. There…
I recently recorded about ten interviews for a webinar produced by a client. I could have used Zoom or Skype but thought that I could achieve better quality by producing the videos with vMix Call. Briefly, vMix is a live streaming software package and Call is the feature that lets you connect with others via…
MediaMelon’s SmartPlay is a streaming optimization solution that reduces bandwidth use by 35% or more and improves QoE while working with your existing ABR content without reencoding. As you’ll read in this post, SmartPlay works by analyzing the quality of every segment in an ABR package and producing a hintfile used by the SmartPlay plug-in…
MediaMelon SmartPlay is a streaming optimization solution that reduces bandwidth costs by 35% or more and improves QoE while working with your existing ABR content without re-encoding. SmartPlay works with any existing encoder, including those with content-adaptive encoding (also called per-title), and most existing players and CDNs. Briefly, SmartPlay works by analyzing the quality of…
There are many quality metrics that use a variety of scoring mechanisms. One of the most frequently used metrics for subjective testing is called Mean Opinion Score, or MOS. The MOS rating is on a scale from 1-5 as shown below (from Wikipedia). You can use a variety of techniques to compute MOS, but typically…
When I first started using Bento4 it ran only on Python 2.7x and earlier. For this reason, the installation instructions in my book Learn to Produce Videos with FFmpeg in 30 Minutes or Less describe how to install Python version 2.7. At some point, however, Bento upgraded to Python 3.x, obsoleting those instructions. I’ve upgraded…
The first review is up for my new course, Streaming Media 101 – Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals, and it’s a five-star review. I designed the course to provide technical fundamentals and an overview of key industry products and services and the companies that create and support them. The goal was to teach students…
Producing the chart above involved encoding 35 files using 5 different presets and then recording start and stop times. Since the files were about 20-seconds long, seconds were important. I’m sure a smarter compressionist than I could write a Python script to harvest the start and stop times but I do it by hand, which…
This is a long post only of interest to those attempting to optimize their VP9 encodes. The three key takeaways are 1) use the command script shown on the bottom of the page, 2) a speed setting of 2 offers the optimal quality/performance tradeoff, and 3) the row-mt setting improves performance significantly with zero quality…
