Blogs

So a potential client calls and says, “we’ve reached encoding capacity and we’re about to buy another encoding station. Can you look at our presets and see if we can improve throughput and delay the purchase?” “Sure,” I responded.  “Send me your encoding presets and I’ll have a look.” Once the presets arrived, I noticed that the encoder was x264-based, …

V-Nova launched their PERSEUS codec on April 1, 2015, an inauspicious day, particularly for a codec vendor making claims like, “offering UHD quality at HD bitrates, HD at SD bitrates, and SD video at audio bitrates.” That day, I was on a thread that proposed alternative headlines; my favorite, which was not penned by me, was, “Startup does something proprietary that …

Imagine you’re walking through Heathrow Airport terminal, shopping for tchotchkes to bring home to spouse and children. You spot a handsome Cambridge sweatshirt, give it a quick rub and squeeze, and it feels great. What do you check next? For me, it’s price, because if it’s £30, it’s coming home, but if it’s £60, I’m buying a “Mind the Gap” …

I’m co-hosting a webinar with MediaPlatform on February 23, 2017 at 2:00 PM ET entitled Top Ten Encoding Mistakes Made by Streaming Producers. Here’s the description.  Join MediaPlatform and Jan Ozer of Streaming Media Magazine for an in-depth discussion that will cover: Live webcasting and on-demand video allow your organization to leverage the power of streaming media to improve internal …

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 …

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 …