Codecs

I recently posted a request for video test clips on LinkedIn. This article summarizes the websites listed in the responses. Thanks to all who responded. 4KMedia An absolutely fabulous resource for compressionists looking for a broad range of 4K footage of reasonable duration, many, like this NY promotional clip, in HDR. Here’s the site description. 4KMedia.org is intended to demonstrate …

Streaming Media East is always a great event for learning, meeting, and greeting, and catching up on the latest trends and technical innovations in the Streaming Industry. This year’s event will be held May 17 – 19 at the Boston Westin Copley Place. I’ll be presenting three times at the show, including a pre-conference session and two sessions during the …

I’m thrilled to speak at Mile-High Video in Denver, which runs from May 7 – 10 2023. My presentation is on Sunday, May 7, entitled, “Encoding and Packaging x265/HDR with FFmpeg, Bento4 and mp4box.” The description is, “this introductory session will cover the basics of producing x265 with FFmpeg, including a look at key quality/performance tradeoff configurations like presets. Then …

Just a quick note that I’ve updated the course, Streaming Media 101: Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals with a new lesson entitled Codec Update 2023. You can see the agenda in Figure 1 below. For those in a hurry, you can scan through and see my recommendations for 2023 forty seconds in. Choosing the best codec for streaming involves …

The Bitmovin Video Developer Report, now in its 6th edition, is one of the most far-reaching and useful documents available to streaming professionals (now with no registration required). It’s a report that I happily download each December and generally refer to frequently during the next twelve months. Like the proverbial elephant, what you find important in the report depends upon …

Learning how to build an encoding ladder is one of the most fundamental tasks for a streaming media professional. It’s astounding how much you need to know to get it right. By way of background, the original encoding ladder used by most professionals was from Apple Tech Note TN2224, long since replaced by Apple’s HLS Authoring Specifications. This H.264-only ladder …

For some reason I can’t explain, Molly Brown’s comment from the movie Titanic, “there’s something you don’t see every day,” (while watching the doomed ship sink), has stuck with me since I saw the movie back in 1997. It recently came to mind when a colleague informed me that HEVC support had eclipsed AV1 on the CanIUse website. You see …

One of the most power-hungry processes performed in data centers is software-based live transcoding, which can be performed much more efficiently with ASIC-based transcoders. With power costs soaring and carbon emissions an ever-increasing concern, data centers that perform high-volume live transcoding should strongly consider switching to ASIC-based transcoders like the NETINT T408. To assist in this transition, NETINT recently published …

In August 2020, the Alliance for Open Media created a software working group to “use the Scalable Video Technology for AV1 (SVT-AV1) encoder developed by Intel…to create AV1 encoder implementations that deliver excellent video compression across applications in ways that remove computational complexity trade-offs for an ever-growing video delivery marketplace.” Testing published around that time indicated that SVT-AV1 had quite …

Streaming Media West was a high-energy conference with a great vibe and the usual elegance of the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Resort & Spa. I gave two talks; a 3-hour preconference session entitled Advanced Codec Implementation & Production and a 45-minute session on Encoding AV1 with Open Source Alternatives. Below are the descriptions and links to the presentation downloads. W1. …