Blogs

So, I was reviewing Camtasia 9 for Streaming Media magazine (review to appear later in the year), and I had promised Capella Systems a testimonial for their Cambria FTC encoder, specifically the per-title encoding feature. Below is the video I produced in Camtasia describing per-title encoding, discussing why it’s important, and detailing how it works in Cambria FTC.  As a …

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 …

Just a quick note to let you know that I’m speaking on two topics at the Streaming Forum later this month in London, and leading two roundtable discussions.    On Tuesday, February 28th, at 11:30, I’ll present HEVC: Rating the contenders. Here’s the description:  Operators adding HEVC to their delivery pipeline will have plenty of codec options, but who has …

Apple Safari has never supported VP8 or VP9, but a move by Google’s YouTube pressures it to do so: Safari users can’t see new 4K videos on YouTube. Apple Safari is the only current browser that doesn’t support Google’s VP9. In a move that may go a long way towards convincing Apple to do so, YouTube has stopped encoding 4K …

I spent a lot of time late last fall looking at Facebook Live, trying to understand who was using it and why, and which tools they used. This effort culminated in three resources available now on the Streaming Media website.  Here’s the main article entitled Facebook Live: A Progress Report After One Year of Growth. The intro, copied below, describes …

First Amazon book review is out from technologist Douglas Dixon, who blogs at the Manifest Tech Blog. I love the title of the review, Ozer Transforms Video Compression from Alchemy to Science, because it captures exactly what I tried to do in the book. Here’s a snippet from the middle of the review. First, Ozer covers the basics of video …

I spoke at Streaming Media West on three topics, the first a 3-hour workshop which was not recorded, and two one-hour sessions that were. The PDFs used in the presentations have been available for awhile; I just added the videos from the two sessions. Here are the links. Workshop – Encoding 2016: Codecs and Packaging for PCs, Mobile and OTT/STB/Smart …

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 …

If Nokia’s standards infringement lawsuit prevails over Apple, the costs could be steep to any company relying on H.264 or even HEVC. Here are the issues at stake. On December 21, 2016, Nokia sued Apple for infringing eight patents related to H.264 encoding and decoding. By its terms, the complaint makes clear that Apple’s usage of H.264 is generic, and …

MPEG LA’s recent announcement of a DASH royalty pool is the first such royalty on free internet video. And this is only the beginning. We’ve all had time to reflect upon MPEG LA’s announcement of a DASH royalty pool. In my case, it led to the realization that this is the first royalty on free internet video and that things …