Blogs

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 …

So, the object of the exercise is a single FFmpeg script that encodes your files and creates the necessary master and media playlists. I took an initial stab here, but wound up with a script, “as ugly as someone else’s baby, particularly the need to duplicate the input file four times for the four streams.” Again through the hard work …

I’m pulling together some materials for my pre-conference session at Streaming Media West (November 18-20 in Los Angeles) entitled Introduction to ABR Production and Delivery. One lesson shows the technology ecosystem needed to implement OTT streaming and identifies key vendors for each function. I figured I’d throw these slides out there to get comments on the topics covered (and not …

Reviewer Ian Kennedy recently reviewed Learn to Produce Video with FFmpeg on Amazon, and he hit the nail on the head in his five-star review, saying: Who this book is for: 1) The decision maker who may be skeptical about using FFmpeg in a production environment compared to a turn-key commercial solution. 2) The video-adjacent engineer who has been asked …

So, there I was downloading videos from YouTube to include in a PowerPoint for a training course I was producing. Unfortunately, my download tool, wondershare’s excellent video converter, downloaded separate audio and video streams, the video in an MP4 wrapper and the audio as an MP3 file. So I had to mux the two to input them into PowerPoint. A …

Streaming Media West is coming up next month in the City of Los Angeles (as opposed to Huntington Beach where it’s been the last few years). Specifically, it’s at the Westin Bonaventure on November 19-20 (Tuesday/Wednesday) with pre-conference sessions on Monday the 18th. I’ll be my normal busy self with two pre-conference sessions and several presentations. Here are the dates, …

On August 12, 2019, I reported in Streaming Media Magazine that the hugely unpopular MPEG LA DASH Pool might be shutting down. I shared what was purported to be a draft letter from MPEG LA President Larry Horn to pool members which stated the following: “Regrettably, with more than one year’s experience marketing the DASH License according to its revised …