Codecs

Author’s Note (March 15, 2022): A colleague recently advised me that YouTube was now encoding all videos into VP9 format. A quick check revealed that he was correct; literally every video that I checked, including some uploaded back in 2010, was encoded into VP9 as well as H.264. What’s interesting is that many low-volume videos, like this one with 118 …

The H.264 codec is still the most widely used video compression technology — aka codec in the world and likely will be for the next few years. For this reason, every streaming media professional should know what the H.264 codec is and how to encode with H.264. This beginner’s guide to encoding H.264 will describe what H.264 is, detail the …

This article on the Wowza website provides a quick overview of the AV1 codec: what it is, how it performs, what it costs, and what it’s good for today. It’s useful if you want to get a quick feel for where AV1 fits in with other codecs. The article is the fourth in a five-part series that covers H.264, VP9, …

This article on the Wowza website provides a quick overview of the HEVC codec: what it is, how it performs, what it costs, and what it’s good for. It concludes with a section on what you need to know to effectively deploy the HEVC codec using the Wowza Streaming Engine software. The article is the third in a five-part series …

This article on the Wowza website provides a quick overview of the VP9 codec: what it is, how it performs, what it costs, and what it’s good for. It concludes with a section on where you should consider deploying VP9 and what you need to know to effectively deploy the codec. The article is the second in a five-part series …

This article on the Wowza website provides a quick overview of the H.264 codec: what it is, how it performs, what it costs, and what it’s good for. It concludes with a section on what you need to know to effectively deploy the H.264 codec, particularly within the Wowza Streaming Engine software and the Wowza Streaming Cloud service. The article …

This article is about a video lesson that computes the bandwidths savings afforded by the FFmpeg-based implementations of VP9 (libvpx-VP9), H.264 (x264), HEVC (x265), and AV1 (libaom-AV1). The lesson uses the Netflix convex hull analysis to build unique encoding ladders for each test clip and codec and shows why BD-Rate figures don’t accurately predict real-world savings. Towards the end, it …

Pleased to announce my second report on LCEVC Technology entitled LCEVC x264 Report: Live Sports & eGames, ABR Ladder. The first report assessed VOD performance at 1080p; this report tested live performance using a full encoding ladder and weighted average performance as well as BD-Rate comparisons. Here’s the Table of Contents. Note, in particular, the GB Tech report in the …

I was honored to present a free webinar entitled Video Codecs in 2021 and Beyond with Muvi on April 8, 2021. The slides and recording are below. Here’s the description. There has never been a time where so many video codecs were available (or soon to be available) for video producers. From MPEG, we have AVC (H.264), HEVC (H.265), VVC …

This article and the associated Google Sheet present an analytical model for computing breakeven on new codec deployments.  On a LinkedIn post here, Johan Skaneby asked: Technical comparisons and documentation on different codec performance are very interesting and important, but all development of technologies are always closely related to market requirements and business models. My experience is that the challenge …