Codecs

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 …

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 …

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 …

According to Bitmovin’s “Video Developer Report 2019,” latency was a concern of 54% of all its survey participants. Digging into the numbers, subsequent questions revealed that almost 50% of survey participants planned to implement a low-latency technology over the next 1–2 years, with over 50% seeking latency of under 5 seconds and 30% seeking latency of under 1 second (See …

All codecs and encoding tools have a configuration option that controls the quality/encoding time tradeoff. With x264 (and x265) the preset controls that tradeoff. When choosing a preset you should consider 3 criteria: Overall quality – the overall quality produced by that preset Low frame quality – the quality of the lowest frame produced by that preset, which indicates the …

I just saw Vimeo’s “isn’t it wonderful that we’re publishing video with AV1” announcement and felt the need to call BS. First, it’s time to stop calling AV1 royalty-free and promoting the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) as some kind of noble effort to keep video on the web free. Second, don’t tell me that you’re using AV1 to “embrace …

Here’s the link to download:  W4-key encoding skills Here’s the description. W4. Key Encoding Skills, Technologies, & Techniques Monday, May 6: 1:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. This session helps encoding professionals get up-to-speed on crucial encoding-related issues, technologies, and techniques. Topics include: Best high-level strategies for delivering to computers, mobile, smart TVs, and OTT (which ABR, codecs, and DRMs are supported …

Here’s the download: T20_Build_Free_Encoder_FFmpeg_Bento_short. The video is below. T202. How To Build A Free Encoder/Packager With Watch Folder Operation Using Open Source Tools Wednesday, May 8: 11:45 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Open source tools like FFmpeg and Bento4 are used to build massive encoding farms for high-profile premium content services, but they also serve wonderfully as simple tools for smaller developers …

Here’s the description; download handout here. T103. A Survey Of Per-Title Encoding Technologies Tuesday, May 7: 1:45 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. Per-title encoding techniques customize the encoding ladder to match the encoding complexity of the source, saving bandwidth on easy-to-compress videos and ensuring the quality of more complex footage. Codec specialist Jan Ozer compares the efficiency, implementation issues, and costs of …