Blogs

In this video, I interviewed Sisvel CEO Mattia Fogliacco about the new VP9 and AV1 patent pools. Our discussion covered: Background on Sisvel Due diligence performed before Sisvel formulated the pool to confirm the validity of their patents Details about the royalty structure and what’s covered by the license (and what’s not covered) The image atop this article comes from …

Luxembourg-based Sisvel International SA announced patent pools for VP9 and AV1 yesterday targeted at consumer display devices (smartphones, TVs, etc) and consumer non-display devices (set-top boxes and OTT devices). Here’s what we know from this article on Streaming Media) and this Q&A. The standard rate for VP9 is € 0.24 for display devices and € 0.08 for non-display devices, while …

When I first tested AV1 encoding back in August 2018 encoding times were glacial and seriously detracted from the potential usability of the codec. Table 1 from that story tells the tale. Unless otherwise indicated, all encoding times are on my HP ZBook notebook powered by a single 2.8 GHz Intel Xeon E3-1505M v5 CPU. In addition, LibVPx is the …

I frequently use the VMAF quality metric to analyze encoding parameters and compare codecs. In my experience, VMAF scores tend to match my own subjective quality observations and the fact that Netflix uses it gives the metric great credibility. Originally, there was only one VMAF version, but Netflix has added both a 4K model and a phone model, increasing the …

According to the last published statistics, in June 2017, Whatsapp users sent over 1 billion video messages a day. This obviously represents only a fraction of the market and daily traffic has certainly has grown since then. At the same time, 4K cameras have become standard and mobile screen resolutions have increased in size and quality, driving demand for higher …

I just finished a project that involved encoding lots of downloaded YUV test files, which is something I never tried before. The problem is that there’s no resolution or frame rate information in the file header, so you have to detail all this in the command string. My first crack at the problem evolved into this command string, obviously for a …

Moscow State University’s Video Quality Measurement Tool (VQMT) has been my go-to file analysis tool dating back to 2014 (see my initial review, here, and an update, here). As you can see in this video, version 11 of the tool adds several new features, including support for the VMAF 4K model, data rate graphs, and a results table. I’ve also …

One frustration of writing books for developers is that they’re not the most prolific group when it comes to writing book reviews (or, well, at least not for my books). So it’s always cause for celebration when a review posts, especially when the review accurately captures the value I was hoping to deliver with the book. So it was with Matthew White’s …