Blogs

Just a quick note that I released a new course on encoding for Multiple Screen Delivery on Udemy for $29. For a limited time, you can buy the course for $24.99 by entering the coupon code MSD_book when you purchase, or by clicking here to buy the course.   The course includes about 3 hours of lectures, starting with H.264 …

A recent consulting project necessitated that I add objective quality measurements to the analysis. The tool I used was the Moscow Statue University Video Quality Measurement Tool (VQMT), which enables comparisons using Peak Signal to Noise (PSNR), Structured Similarity Index (SSIM), and the new Video Quality Metric (VQM), which I found most useful.  In this review on the Streaming Media …

While HEVC is getting most of the buzz surrounding Ultra High Definition (UHD) codecs, it plays in exactly zero browsers at this point, while VP9 plays in 60% of the available browsers. In tests I performed for my sessions at Streaming Media West, VP9 delivered better quality than HEVC at similar encoding parameters. So why isn’t VP9 getting the respect …

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is in a state of flux and will change dramatically over the next 12 – 18 months. This introductory-level article explains what DRM is, why it’s important, how it works now, and the upcoming changes to the Media Source Extensions (MSE) and Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). This story appears on the Jan/Febuary issue of Streaming Media …

A press release entitled Adobe Updates All Pro Video Applications just crossed my desk. Here are the paragraphs relevant to Premiere Pro and the Adobe Media Encoder.  Premiere Pro – The Premiere Pro CC 2014.2 update includes a number of feature enhancements for editors, including support for Arri Open Gate media, the ability to set transitions and still image default …

Though the lead is slipping, viewing of Internet video on computers still dominates that of tablets, mobile phones or OTT devices, according to a report entitled, US Digital Video Audience Profile: Who’s Watching, How They’re Watching and What Screens They’re Watching, that I spotted on eMarketer (citing data from HUB REsearch). Red is data from 2013, black is data from 2014.  …

Earlier this year, I released a Udemy course on the Adobe Media Encoder. Over the last couple of months, the course received a couple of five star reviews that I thought I would share. Here they are. From Evan Roberts: Jan does a great service by providing this course. This course is a must for anyone considering purchasing and/or using …

I’m not one to go negative, but when I saw that Microsoft was including HEVC in Windows 10, scheduled for release in 2015, I just had to laugh. Over two years after Windows 8 shipped, I still use it only when I absolutely have to. The most ardent recommendation I make to friends buying a new Windows computer is to …

Every once in awhile, a slide comes a long that’s so brilliant that you just have to share it. So it is with the slide below from Will Law’s presentation at the 2013 Velocity Conference entitled Optimizing the Black Box of HTML Video. I’ve always struggled to efficiently (under 30 seconds or less) explain why single bitrate video (SBR) is …

OK, I’ll be honest, the headline is strictly for grabbing eyeballs. Still, on several videos that I checked, Adobe is using HTML5 for delivery, rather than Flash, going as far as to encode in VP8 for Firefox playback (rather than falling back to Flash and using H.264). Here’s the short backstory. I received an email from Adobe’s PR team to …