Blogs

Demuxed is the annual conference for video engineers by video engineers. Held on October 17 and 18 in San Francisco, the conference included 31 speakers giving talks in rapid-fire fashion ranging in duration from 10 to 30 minutes. To use a well-worn but appropriate metaphor, the experience is like drinking from a fire hose: almost impossible to comprehend and digest in …

Here’s the description; download handout below. T101. HOW-TO: Fine-Tuning Your Adaptive Encoding Groups With Objective Quality Metrics Tuesday, November 13: 10:30 a.m. – 11:15 a.m. Choosing the number of streams in an adaptive group and configuring them is usually a subjective, touchy-feely exercise, with no way to really gauge the effectiveness and efficiency of the streams. However, by measuring stream …

W4. Encoding Live & VOD For HEVC/HLS Monday, November 12: 1:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. Apple’s support for HEVC in HLS is a groundbreaking event that opens up hundreds of millions of HEVC capable players. If supporting this spec is on your short-term development schedule, check out this workshop. The workshop starts by reviewing the new spec and sharing playback …

I have a confession to make. Though I’ve attended dozens of Streaming Media conferences, I’ve never attended a kickoff session. Not, of course, because the content wasn’t information and insightful, but because I’m always scurrying about trying to finish my own presentations. This dubious accomplishment ends at Streaming Media West next month, when Roger Pantos, the inventor of HTTP Live …

I’ve been pondering what drives codec adoption since I joined compression company Iterated Systems back in 1993. Tonight, I have the opportunity to explore the subject in detail at a meetup sponsored by Bitmovin as an adjunct to the Demuxed conference here in San Francisco. Entitled The Battle of the Codecs: AV1 vs VVC, the meetup will be held tonight …

A recent consulting project involved computing the VMAF, SSIM, and PSNR scores of 30 fps 480p video encoded from a 60 fps 1080p source file. I’ve not performed measurements like this in the past and assumed that simply converting the 60 fps sources file to 30 fps via the “-r” option would convert from 60 fps to 30 fps and …

I’m releasing the 2018 update to my book Learn to Produce Video with FFmpeg in 30 Minutes or Less, and you can download a chapter for free below. It’s Chapter 4 on bitrate control techniques which includes constant bitrate encoding (CBR), variable bitrate encoding (VBR), Constant Rate Factor (CRF), and Capped CRF. As with all chapters, there’s instruction to help you …

There are two mostly vestigial problems that I didn’t address in Learn to Produce Video with FFmpeg in 30 Minutes or Less because so few people encounter them. These are deinterlacing and aspect ratio mismatches. Now I’m writing a textbook with a greater scope, so I had to learn how to deal with both in FFmpeg. These will make it …

This is the first of five articles on how to cut your encoding and streaming costs. [dt_quote type=”pullquote” layout=”left” font_size=”big” animation=”none” size=”1″]This article discusses how you can cut x264 encoding costs by 73% without noticeable quality degradation and triple your x265 capacity while actually improving real world video quality. [/dt_quote] A key focus of my book Video Encoding by the Numbers …

Sorenson Squeeze was one of the first encoding tools that many streaming professionals used and now it’s officially end-of-lifed as you can see from the featured image atop this page (from here). It’s not really a surprise; in 2015, I interviewed new Sorenson CEO Marcus Liassides who described how Sorenson would be focusing on building tools to drive the future of …