Blogs

Okay, so the title is a bit of an eyeball grab, but it is based in fact. In preparing for a session on making the switch from Flash to HTML5 to be held in a couple of weeks at Streaming Media West, JW Player VP John Luther prepared some statistics about codec usage in the JW Player network.  By way …

Here are all the sessions that I’ll be producing or participating in at Streaming Media West in two weeks. I hope to see you there. Monday, November 16, 2015 W1: Encoding 2015: Codecs and Packaging for PCs, Mobile and OTT/STB/Smart TVs 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. As video resolutions increase and target playback platforms multiply, video producers must leave their …

So here I am preparing for an upcoming session at Streaming Media West entitled Encoding 2015: Codecs and Packaging for PCs, Mobile and OTT/STB/Smart TVs, and I wanted to determine the current market share of MSE and EME capable browsers. I started with a quick trip over to NetMarketshare where I displayed the Desktop Browser Version Market Share and copied …

Another webinar, another few lessons. Probably most important is the hard lesson facing many content developers who want to present a webinar for lead generation, but don’t want to give away their critical content during the webinar. It’s a pretty tough balance sometimes, how to give away enough information to make the webinar worthwhile, but not enough so that prospects …

Just a quick riff on encoding versus packaging. The concept of encoding involves converting a mezzanine file into distributable output like MP4 files, or ABR formats like HLS or DASH. The concept of packaging is taking previously encoded MP4 files and converting those to distributable ABR output format like HLS or DASH.  The heavy lifting, of course, is converting the …

The survey results are in: So, out of 87 responses, over 50% chose DASH, while over 30% choose HLS. The balance chose to explain why, and there were some very useful comments. “Not sure why I wouldn’t cover both options.” “DASH also doesn’t work on OTT boxes like AppleTV and Roku, where HLS does. DASH does have support for VP9 …

I am a bit behind the times on this one, but on September 29th, 2015, the BBC launched an HTML5-based player based upon the Media Source Extensions and MPEG-DASH. You can read about their implementation in a blog post, here. The new implementation is very platform-specific, and BBC announced that they were testing on the following platforms. Firefox 41 Opera …

This post will quickly summarize the current status of HEVC royalties. There are two existing patent pools. The first was assembled by MPEG LA and calls for royalties of $0.20/unit on encoders and decoders, after a 100,000 de minimus exception, with a US $25 million annual cap, and no royalty on encoded content. Here’s a screen grab from a presentation on the …

I'm big into quality control and objective video measurement, and the latest tool that I've tested, SSIMWaves SQM (link to tool here) , offers a couple of unique elements, including a scoring system that attempts to correspond to actual human subject

The Thunderbolt port on a MacPro lets it function as a highly capable live streaming system. Thunderbolt can be a very useful expansion option for streaming and other video production, particularly if you are producing on a Mac workstation or laptop.