Blogs

My wife was watching a webinar for CME and there were two physicians with such picture perfect presentation that I just had to snap the image and comment. The list of what these two did right is lengthy and instructive. Both practiced perfect rule-of-thirds positioning, with their eyes about 1/3 down from the top of the frame. For this reason, their …

AV1 encoding is now only 2x slower than x265. See the latest results here.  I began testing AV1 early this week. Briefly, my tests involve 16 ten-second clips in four genres (movies, sports, animations, gaming) and an “other” category (music video, nature video). I’ve completed the first set of tests with FFmpeg 4.3, benchmarking x264, x265, and the latest version …

I’m reviewing AV1 encoders for Streaming Media Magazine and was performing some QC on the AV1 files that I produced with the latest version of FFmpeg. Two file details I always check are GOP size and whether the GOPs are closed or not. I check these for multiple reasons.

This article details how Brazilian OTT operator Telecine deployed MediaMelon SmartPlay and decreased bandwidth costs by about 42% while improving the MOS quality of the video delivered. SmartPlay also helped Telecine manage the 4X increase in demand due to COVID-19. This is the third and final story about MediaMelon SmartPlay. The first article describes how SmartPlay works and the benefits …

In the previous post, I described what MediaMelon SmartPlay is and identified some of the benefits. In this post, I’ll discuss pricing and how to integrate SmartPlay into your encoding, delivery, and playback infrastructure. Pricing Overview Let’s briefly discuss the SmartPlay pricing model here and look at ROI at the end of this document. There are two pricing models. The …

I recently recorded about ten interviews for a webinar produced by a client. I could have used Zoom or Skype but thought that I could achieve better quality by producing the videos with vMix Call. Briefly, vMix is a live streaming software package and Call is the feature that lets you connect with others via RTC for recording conferences. Some …

MediaMelon’s SmartPlay is a streaming optimization solution that reduces bandwidth use by 35% or more and improves QoE while working with your existing ABR content without reencoding. As you’ll read in this post, SmartPlay works by analyzing the quality of every segment in an ABR package and producing a hintfile used by the SmartPlay plug-in installed in the player to …

MediaMelon SmartPlay is a streaming optimization solution that reduces bandwidth costs by 35% or more and improves QoE while working with your existing ABR content without re-encoding. SmartPlay works with any existing encoder, including those with content-adaptive encoding (also called per-title), and most existing players and CDNs. Briefly, SmartPlay works by analyzing the quality of your live or VOD ABR …