Blogs

I’ve been tracking Scalable Video Coding (SVC) for the last year or so and there’s been little tangible evidence of adoption. Recently Toronto-based Seawell Networks came out of stealth mode, but only barely, announcing that they are in the H.264 marketplace, but providing no product details. I met company CEO Brian Collie at a trade show last November, but he …

A few weeks ago, I published an interview with MPEG LA CEO Larry Horn on the patent group’s decision not to charge for free content encoded with H.264. Then I got a note back from a reader who stated: I’m disappointed. The interview seemed to be pretty powder puff. Why not ask the harder questions, e.g., was your decision in …

So, I was doing some consulting work for a client who’s currently encoding with the x264 codec. Part of the work involved benchmarking their current quality against other encoding tools I have around the office, so I downloaded the x264 QuickTime Codec (Mac) from Softonic, which was the tool used by the client. Briefly, after installing the codec, you access …

I recently posted an H.264 vs. Ogg comparison, which you can see here. Ogg vs H264 – Round One I got lots of good feedback and am in the process of reworking my tests, primarily (I hope) to use a more recent codebase that wasn’t shipping when I did my testing. In the meantime, another comparison was released on February …

Late last week, Google closed the On2 acquisition that they started in 2009, and now owns the VP4 – VP8 video codecs. At the time, there was much debate about Google’s intent, now most analysts assume that Google bought On2 to open source the codec and let it serve as the basis for the video tag in HTML5. For a …

I do a lot of production work and testing on my HP Z800 workstation. Though it’s got a 250 GB C: drive, with a 1 TB video drive where I store all projects and associated video, I started getting messages that I was running out of space on my C: drive. I couldn’t imagine why since I store all the …

Ever since the iPad announcement, the inter-relationships between HTML5, Flash, H.264 and Ogg Theora have been intriguing me, so I spent last week trying to figure it all out. The result is The Future of Web Video, Part 1; HTML5? Someday. Ogg? Probably not, over at the Digital Content Producer web site. It’s an article that’s bound to irritate lots …

Interesting line of questions on the Advanced Streaming List recently. One producer shared that he was encoding using the following parameters: 768kbps512×288H.264 Main Profile Level 3.1 Microsoft’s Ben Waggoner, author of Compression for Great Video and Audio, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of compression related matters, responded: “High Profile instead of Main Profile; decode complexity is the same, and you …

This is not an earthshaking post, but I thought I would share it anyway. I’ve never been a fan of Apple’s decision to use FireWire 800 adapters on their most recent lines of computers since it meant that I couldn’t connect my camcorders to them without an adapter. I’ve resisted purchasing a FireWire 800 to 400 adapter because I have …

Interesting post came from the StreamingMedia Advanced list today: Question:  Anyone have any advise on key frame placement in h264 flash? I felt like I should know the answer to this, so I pulled together the following: Answer: Interesting question. For single file streaming, make sure that keyframes at scene changes are enabled. In terms of interval, ESPN uses one …