Author’s note: This is a very simple automation technique for FFmpeg beginners. I’m sure there are much more efficient ways to script this project, but this represents my baby steps in FFmpeg automation. I recently started a consulting project that involved encoding multiple files to multiple CRF values to create rate-distortion curves and BD-Rate computations.…
Any book author will tell you that while the revenue is nice, hearing from readers that find your book useful is even better. In this regard, I’m excited to blog about the following new five-star review of my book Encoding by the Numbers. What I tried to do in Encoding by the Numbers was to…
Encoding files with Open-GOPs is supposed to produce better quality than closed GOPs because B and P frames can reference frames located outside the GOP. However, files produced for ABR streaming should have closed GOPs. This paper explores the defaults for x264 and x265, the quality difference between closed and open GOPs, and the RADL…
On September 11, 2019, Streaming Media Magazine published an article entitled Hardware-Based Transcoding Solutions Roundup: Testing Performance, that compared various H.264 and HEVC encoders using objective and subjective testing. The HEVC encoders tested included Intel’s SVT (Scalable Video Technology)-HEVC, a software-based codec; NGCodec’s FPGA-based HEVC encoder (now owned by Xilinx) and x265 using the medium…
Recently, video quality metrics have gotten a lot of hate, primarily from codec vendors. For example, yesterday on LinkedIn, respected Beamr CTO Dror Gill wrote, “everyone agrees that subjective (human) testing is the only accurate way to measure true perceptual quality.” After I pointed out industry support for using video quality metrics, Gill graciously changed…
The Moscow State University Video Quality Measurement Tool has long been my go-to desktop tool for computing video quality metric scores. When I created my course on Video Quality Metrics, I included six lessons on using the tool. Here’s a brief video that shows operation and the new features in Version 12. Lessons in…
Moscow State University’s Video Quality Measurement Tool (VQMT, $999 with volume discounts available) is my go-to desktop tool for computing metrics like VMAF, PSNR, and SSIM. The program is easy to use, has great visualization tools, and lets me inspect videos on a frame-by-frame basis. MSU recently released version 12 which has three great enhancements.This…
Most streaming producers adopted HLS and DASH without any concern about intellectual property issues. Though MPEG LA formed a DASH Pool in 2015 it seemed to have died a quiet death in August 2019. Now one of the pool members, Helios Digital, is suing Crackle, Vudu, and Showtime Digital for infringing their DASH patents. As…
A student of one of my courses recently asked, “I need a tool, which does the same job as BitrateViewer but for HEVC. Which tool do you use when you need to get some sort of a plot or just a list of bitrates per each second?” Great question. If you don’t know Bitrate Viewer,…
I had a 45-minute session at Streaming Media West 2019 entitled HOW-TO: Fine-Tuning Your Encoding With Objective Quality Metrics You can download the handout here. This version is about 200 MB because it contains three video demonstrations of the SSIMPLUS VOD Monitor and several other videos, but you’ll need Flash installed to run them (it’s…
