Blogs

Whenever I speak in public about streaming production, I try to back up my recommendations with file parameters gathered from prominent media and corporate sites. Here are some file statistics gathered for a series of sessions that I taught this spring and summer. Information from the first slide was gathered from about 50 corporate and media sites, which I divided …

OK, being somewhat of a jerk here with the headline, but I’ve been pretty public in my thoughts that it’s time to transition from VP6 to H.264. Still, if you’re not ready for that move, perhaps you might want to rethink your current VP6 encoding parameters. If so, you might find this data, gleaned from multiple broadcast sites, useful. Hope …

From my general perspective, HTML5 has been lots of smoke with very little fire, in part because it’s not yet a complete spec that meets the needs of large scale video publisher. Though Google/YouTube has been an avid HTML5 proponent, a recent blog post from YouTube programmer John Harding identifies why YouTube won’t abandon Flash any time soon. Entitled “Flash …

June – 2010 – OK, it was just one department of the Navy – the Carderock Division in West Bethesda, Maryland. According to their web site, “Carderock Division is the principal Navy resource, national focal point and international leader in surface and undersea vehicle science, ship systems and related maritime technology. A major technical component of the Naval Sea Systems …

June 23, 2010 – Just back from a day and 1/2 of streaming related training at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. The Agency was transitioning from a Real Networks-based system over to Flash, and wanted a general introduction to Flash and current practices of streaming producers. Here’s the agenda, and you can download a detailed outline of …

As expected, Google open sourced the VP8 codec today at their IO conference in San Francisco. You can read my overview article for StreamingMedia.com here, or check out www.webmproject.org, a site that details the announcement. Briefly, as you may recall, Google acquired the VP8 codec when they purchased codec developer On2, in a deal that closed early this year. Today, …

OK, I have a presentation to finalize for at StreamingMedia East, but my US Air flight bound for LaGuardia offered a free trial of inflight Wi-Fi (via Gogo, a service of Aircell), so how could I resist (particularly with the Players Championship coming to a close, and the Celts playing the Cavs)? I haven’t been flying a lot recently, but …

iPad compatibility has been top of mind for the last couple of months or so, and like all web producers, I’d like the ability to deliver video to the million plus iPads that have sold in the first few weeks since launch. Well here’s how in thirty seconds or less. By way of background, I was chatting with the Sorenson …

In a recent blog post, Microsoft stated “We think H.264 is an excellent format. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only.”  Though Mozilla currently enjoys (by far) the largest HTML5-compatible installed base of any browser, they don’t currently support H.264; just Ogg Theora, which is supported by Google Chrome and Opera, but not Safari or …

Got an email today from a colleague today that triggered the headline thought (time to switch from VP6 to H.264). His rationale was that now that MPEG-LA has extended the royalty-free period for free H.264 Internet video, it was time to change over to H.264. He was wondering whether H.264 could maintain the same quality as VP6 at 75% of …