Blogs

I had a 45-minute session at Streaming Media West 2019 entitled HOW-TO: Fine-Tuning Your Encoding With Objective Quality Metrics You can download the handout here. This version is about 200 MB because it contains three video demonstrations of the SSIMPLUS VOD Monitor and several other videos, but you’ll need Flash installed to run them (it’s PowerPoint, not me). You can …

A colleague asked for some resources relating to VMAF. Rather than answer in an email I thought I would create a post around it. Some of these are from Netflix, most from me (Jan Ozer). I’ve broken the items into three groups; Computing VMAF, Using VMAF, and About VMAF. I hope you find this collection useful. Computing VMAF My default way …

Versatile Video Coding (VVC) is a codec “drafted by a joint collaborative team of ITU-T and ISO/IEC experts known as the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET), which is a partnership of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG),” as MPEG explains. The codec is designed to meet upcoming needs in videoconferencing, OTT streaming, mobile telephony, …

My article, What is VVC, just published on Streaming Media. Briefly, VVC is “codec next” from the perspective of MPEG (see image above) that’s due out in mid-to-late 2020. The Streaming Media article identifies the new “tools” in the codec, early performance results, and what we know about licensing. It’s way too early for most producers to start thinking about …

The Voronoi omnidirectional video metrics have the best correlation between test scores and subjective ratings than all measured 2D and 3D metrics according to its inventors. It’s an open-source metric you can download and learn to use below. I’ll be discussing the Voronoi metric in my upcoming talk on 2D and 3D video quality metrics at Streaming Media West and …

Author’s note: When this post was written, the Zeranoe FFmpeg Windows download didn’t include VMAF, so you had to either download this version or compile your own. Now the Zeranoe version does include VMAF support; all you need to do is download the models and run the correct command strings. To learn how to do this, check out the blog …

This blog identifies six incredibly useful FFmpeg commands for transmuxing, extracting audio/video, converting to YUV/Y4M, and scaling to different resolutions. All commands are included in my book, Learn to Produce Videos with FFmpeg In 30 Minutes or Less ($34.95), and course, FFmpeg for Adaptive Bitrate Production ($29.95)  (which includes a PDF copy of the book). Don’t just learn FFmpeg; become an …

At its most basic level, streaming media is the delivery of audio and video files from a server to a client over the internet or a cellular data network. The first streaming audio was delivered in 1995, while the first streaming video followed two years later; you can read more about the early history of the technology in the first …

I’m pulling together some materials for my pre-conference session at Streaming Media West (November 18-20 in Los Angeles) entitled Objective Quality Metrics 2D & 3D: What They Are, How To Compute Them, & How To Use Them. One lesson talks about “tuning” when encoding files to be measured with metrics like PSNR, VMAF, and SSIM. It’s a crucial issue to …

Ideahub and Helios Streaming LLC have sued three streaming publishers, Showtime, Vudu, and Crackle (and other Sony Properties), for infringing upon a set of DASH patents. The suits, all filed in Federal District Court in Delaware, came within days after MPEG LA seemingly shuttered its DASH Patent Pool, which now states, “The DASH Patent Portfolio License is no longer offered to …