Codecs

At Mile High Video 2025, I sat down with Igor Oreper, Bitmovin’s Chief Strategy Officer, to discuss the company’s latest innovations, including their next-generation web player, advancements in live encoding, and AI-driven contextual advertising. Igor also shared his insights on Bitmovin’s cloud-agnostic strategy and the importance of developer-focused events like Mile High Video. You can watch the interview on YouTube …

At Mile High Video 2025, I sat down with Jean-Baptiste Kempf (JB), founder of Kyber and lead developer of VLC, to discuss his latest innovations in ultra-low latency video control. JB is well-known in the open-source community for his work on VLC Player and FFmpeg, and now, with Kyber, he’s pushing the boundaries of real-time machine control. You can watch …

Jan Ozer recently caught up with Beamr’s Sharon Carmel at Mile High Video 2025. The two talked about Beamr’s latest advancements in real-time content-adaptive bitrate (CABR) optimization, super-resolution technology, and codec modernization. They also discussed Beamr’s collaboration with NVIDIA and how AI is shaping the future of video streaming. You can watch the interview on YouTube here, and it’s embedded …

AI-based video compression has been discussed in research for years, but practical implementations are virtually nonexistent. In a recent conversation with Arsalan Zafar, CTO and co-founder of Deep Render, and Sebastjan Cizel, Head of Engineering, we explored the real-world performance of Deep Render’s AI codec real-world encoding and decoding performance, how its quality compares to HEVC, AV1, and VP9, and …

When my daughter owned a Tesla during her college years, one thing I never thought to do was play YouTube videos on the LCD panel. It turns out that was a good call—if I had tried to stream AV1 content, playback performance likely would have been choppy and disappointing. Why bring this up? Tesla recently announced that it was rolling …

This paper, entitled, C3: High-performance and low-complexity neural compression from a single image or video, and authored by a team from Google DeepMind (Hyunjik Kim, Matthias Bauer, Lucas Theis, Jonathan Schwarz, and Emilien Dupont), introduces DeepMind C3, a neural compression method designed to deliver low decoding complexity while achieving competitive rate-distortion (RD) performance. The authors are recognized for their contributions …

The white paper, authored by researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China, introduces a novel approach to addressing the limitations of pre-trained learned image compression (LIC) models. These models, while effective within the domains they were trained on, often falter when applied to new, domain-specific data. To overcome this, the researchers propose lightweight adapters that allow efficient …

It started with a simple observation: Fox plans to upscale a 1080p HDR feed to 4K for the Super Bowl LIX broadcast. The comment came from Dan Rayburn, who shared details about Fox’s planned encoding ladder, including a maximum bitrate of 15 Mbps for 4K delivery. This revelation prompted a lively LinkedIn discussion among industry experts, exploring the decision’s technical, …

A new AI-based codec proved 18% more efficient than VVC but substantial decoding requirements will limit short-term commercial application. Here’s a summary of the white paper.  In December 2024, researchers from Fudan University introduced M3-CVC, an AI-based video compression framework that combines large multimodal models (LMMs) for semantic understanding and conditional diffusion models (CDMs) for high-fidelity reconstruction. The framework employs …

I’m running some 1-pass vs. 2-pass comparison testing with x265. Unlike with x264 (see tests here), there’s a substantial performance penalty for running 2-pass with minimal quality benefit. I tried the no-slow-firstpass=1 setting, which only accelerated two-pass by about 14%. Here are the results from a single test file. I don’t want to process them all if there’s a magic …