Blogs

Nine members of the MPEG LA HEVC patent pool are leaving the pool and now will be included within the HEVC Advance HEVC pool. This changes the balance of power between these two pools, though licensees who signed with the MPEG LA pool before the departures will continue to have coverage for these patents going forward. The MPEG LA pool, which has more …

Any book author will tell you that while the revenue is nice, hearing from readers that find your book useful is even better. In this regard, I’m excited to blog about the following new five-star review of my book Encoding by the Numbers. What I tried to do in Encoding by the Numbers was to tie all configuration decisions to …

This article defines open and closed GOPs, identifies why closed GOPs are better, and details how to produce closed GOPs in FFmpeg with x264 and x265. The level of testing and analysis detailed here is consistent with the instruction in my book, Learn to Produce Videos with FFmpeg In 30 Minutes or Less ($34.95), and my course, FFmpeg for Adaptive …

On September 11, 2019, Streaming Media Magazine published an article entitled Hardware-Based Transcoding Solutions Roundup: Testing Performance, that compared various H.264 and HEVC encoders using objective and subjective testing. The HEVC encoders tested included Intel’s SVT (Scalable Video Technology)-HEVC, a software-based codec; NGCodec’s FPGA-based HEVC encoder (now owned by Xilinx) and x265 using the medium and veryfast presets. After the …

Recently, video quality metrics have gotten a lot of hate, primarily from codec vendors. For example, yesterday on LinkedIn, respected Beamr CTO Dror Gill wrote, “everyone agrees that subjective (human) testing is the only accurate way to measure true perceptual quality.” After I pointed out industry support for using video quality metrics, Gill graciously changed this to “everyone agrees that …

I know Thanksgiving was a couple of weeks ago, but as we close out the year, I want to say thank you to the three suppliers of codec-related usage data—Bitmovin, Encoding.com, and LiveU—and summarize the data they supplied us in 2019. This will put the stamp on what we know this year and set the stage for 2020. I’ll discuss …

The Moscow State University Video Quality Measurement Tool has long been my go-to desktop tool for computing video quality metric scores. When I created my course on Video Quality Metrics, I included six lessons on using the tool. Here’s a brief video that shows operation and the new features in Version 12.  Lessons in the tutorial cover operations like …

Moscow State University’s Video Quality Measurement Tool (VQMT, $999 with volume discounts available) is my go-to desktop tool for computing metrics like VMAF, PSNR, and SSIM. The program is easy to use, has great visualization tools, and lets me inspect videos on a frame-by-frame basis. MSU recently released version 12 which has three great enhancements.This article covers these plus this …

Most streaming producers adopted HLS and DASH without any concern about intellectual property issues. Though MPEG LA formed a DASH Pool in 2015 it seemed to have died a quiet death in August 2019. Now one of the pool members, Helios Digital, is suing Crackle, Vudu, and Showtime Digital for infringing their DASH patents. As I state in my article …

A student of one of my courses recently asked, “I need a tool, which does the same job as BitrateViewer but for HEVC. Which tool do you use when you need to get some sort of a plot or just a list of bitrates per each second?” Great question. If you don’t know Bitrate Viewer, it’s a great way to …