Blogs

I’ll be speaking on HEVC, VP9, and AV1 at Streaming Media East, though the presentation description mentions only HEVC. You can download the handout below. Here’s the description. A102 – How To: Comparing And Choosing The Best HEVC Codec Content distributors and aggregators adding HEVC to their delivery pipeline will have plenty of codec options, but who has the time …

On February 2, online event producer INXPO published a question and answer session regarding my new book, Video Encoding by the Numbers. The session included six questions, ranging from, “how did you get into writing a book on compression?” to “who is this book for?” The most revealing question was, “what’s different from other books on streaming production?” Here’s the response. What’s new …

On Tuesday, May 16, 2017, at Streaming Media East, I’m presenting a talk entitled How To: Comparing and Choosing The Best HEVC Codec. Unfortunately, I could only get two codec vendors to participate, x265 and MainConcept. It’s not for lack of trying; I also asked Elemental, Beamr/Vanguard, and Fraunhofer if they’d like to participate and all declined, as did Intel, Ittiam, …

I was performing some research for my upcoming workshop at Streaming Media East (W4 – Encoding 2017: Codecs & Packaging for PCs, Mobile & OTT/STB/Smart TVs). Basically, I wanted to see how many of the larger advertising-supported websites like ESPN/CNN had transitioned over from Flash to HTML5. Last time I checked, few if any had, largely because ads weren’t yet widely …

Apple could make all of this easier to remember if they changed the name of the BANDWIDTH tag to PEAK BANDWIDTH, which is really what it means. Since that’s unlikely to happen, if you just remember that BANDWIDTH means peak bandwidth, you should be able to keep it straight.  In this article, I take a quick look at the VOD …

I’m proud to announce my latest book, Video Encoding by the Numbers, Eliminate the Guesswork from your Streaming Video, which is available now on Amazon. You can read all about the book by clicking here, or click here for a detailed table of contents. Briefly, after introductory chapters get you up to speed and familiar with objective quality metrics, the next chapters focus on key …

I really was positive about HEVC when there was one pool from MPEG LA with a $25M/year cap. It was three times the cost of H.264, but HEVC was a better technology, so it seemed reasonable, and there were no content royalties. Certainly the industry thought the MPEG LA pool was reasonable  as there was barely a murmur in response. …

On April 3, 2017, London codec developer V-Nova announced PERSEUS 2.0; you can read the complete release here. I visited V-Nova in March 2016, and wrote an update for Streaming Media that you can read here. Basically, the press release/announcement makes three key points. First, the codec is tuned for what V-Nova calls key “operating points, including: 100 kbps, the minimum …

The Streaming Learning Center will host a webinar entitled HEVC: Rating the Contenders on April 18, 2017 at 2:00 PM EST. The free event will review the findings of extensive comparisons of the x265 and MainConcept HEVC codecs with x264 and VP9. Specifically, the test protocol involved three test files, Sintel (an animated production), Tears of Steel (mixed real world video and …

Hey all, recently announced my new book, Video Encoding by the Numbers:Eliminate the Guesswork from your Streaming Video, which you can read all about here. The paperback version in full color is available on Amazon for $49.95 here, or you can download a PDF version for $39.95 from a service called Sendowl here. Why no Kindle version? Because Amazon’s Kindle royalty …