Blogs

At the recent World Wide Developer’s Conference (WWDC), Apple announced that the next versions of Safari, iOS, and tvOS will support HLS with HEVC encoded video. This puts Apple firmly in the HEVC camp, with the Alliance for Open Media camp (Amazon, Cisco, Intel, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, and many others) supporting the AV1 codec (and the VP9 codec before …

Learn to Produce Video with FFmpeg in 30 Minutes or Less, is an entry-level book for developers who need to produce single MP4 or adaptive groups with FFmpeg, the free, open-source utility used in some of the largest encoding farms in the world. The book also includes a primer on terms and technologies related to streaming and recommended settings for …

Just back from Streaming Media East where I was interviewed by Tim Siglin on Facebook Live about my new book. I downloaded the video file from Facebook and wanted to create a quick excerpt, but Premiere Pro crashed twice during my initial edits, so I updated to the newest release. That fixed the crashes, but when I tried to insert …

Here’s the description; handout is below. LS103 – Technologies for Live Streaming to Multiple Platforms Streaming to one live streaming service is so 2016. Today, in addition to streaming to your own website or app, you may want to distribute your live stream to multiple other outlets like Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Livestream, Twitter, and Twitch. Fortunately, there are a …

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 encoding …