Codecs

Three recent Alliance for Open Media presentations on YouTube shed new light on AV2’s performance and utility. Andrew Norkin, Director of Codec Development at Netflix, presented the current status and architecture of AV2. He outlined the codec’s design goals, early performance results, and hardware-focused development approach, noting that the low-level toolset is now finalized. The YouTube video is here. Ryan …

Multiview, or the ability to view multiple live feeds simultaneously, is quickly becoming a must-have feature for sports and live-event streaming. The core technical question for providers is how to implement it.  There are two main architectural options: client-side and server-side multiview. Both can display multiple games or camera angles on a screen, but they work in very different ways, …

I recently interviewed David Ronca, who you probably know from his work at Meta and Netflix, but who’s now running his own company, RoncaTech. We discussed the upcoming release of VCAT (Video Codec Acid Test), a tool that benchmarks video playback performance on Android devices. By way of background, I reviewed an earlier version of VCAT for Streaming Media Magazine. …

AI video compression standards have moved from the research lab to the standards committee. This post summarizes the current status of formal standardization efforts as of July 2025, the groups driving them, and the anticipated timeline for real-world deployment. If you’re wondering whether the next generation of video codecs will be AI-native or just AI-enhanced, this should give you a …

I recently tested the Deep Render AI codec and issued a report, which you can read here. The bottom line was that in the tested low-latency use case, the Deep Render AI codec substantially outperformed SVT-AV1 quality-wise and was only slightly behind VVenC. While the codec lacks features like bitrate control that are necessary for most deployments, it offers outstanding integration …

Streaming Media recently published my article on VVC and AV1, Software Decoding and the Future of Mobile Video. An honest evaluation of the article might observe that while the quality comparisons between SVT-AV1 and VVenC were relatively complete, the article didn’t share any mobile playback performance data. That’s because I couldn’t find any VVC players for testing on either mobile platform.  …

While many AI-based codecs are still making their first appearance in white papers, often with tortured playback requirements and no working decoder, the Deep Render codec is already encoding in FFmpeg, playing in VLC, and running on the billions of NPU-enabled devices already in the market. Let’s take a step back. I’ve been following the development of the Deep Render …

If you’re optimizing x265 for speed, enabling Wavefront Parallel Processing (WPP) looks like a no-brainer. Table 1 shows a staggering 7.3x improvement in encoding time. A 3:15 encode with WPP turns into a painful 23:51 without it. The quality penalty? Negligible. VMAF drops just 0.19, with the low-frame VMAF off by only 0.77  (low-frame is the lowest VMAF score of …

I’ve been involved in a seemingly never-ending debate that started with the dubious (to me) concept of blaming Brightcove’s recent layoffs on HEVC licensing practices. The three questions involved are: Was HEVC’s licensing structure an aberration or similar to other technologies? Was HEVC a commercial success despite these licensing practices? Why didn’t non-premium content publishers adopt it? I have strong …

One of the more intriguing questions surrounding Brazil’s TV 3.0 broadcast upgrade is whether it will help drive LCEVC’s success. LCEVC seems like a technology in need of a tailwind — will TV 3.0 provide it? Alongside VVC, LCEVC is now mandated in receiver devices as part of the spec, which is a significant milestone. But inclusion in a standard …