Encoding

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, …

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 …

Many producers distribute the same encoding ladder to all viewers. However, sending a 1080p stream to smartphone viewers may be a waste of bandwidth as both SSIMPLUS and VMAF scores reveal that lower resolution, lower-bandwidth videos deliver similar quality at a lower cost. This tutorial, from my course Computing and Using Video Quality Metrics, shows you the tests I performed …

On August 12, 2019, I reported in Streaming Media Magazine that the hugely unpopular MPEG LA DASH Pool might be shutting down. I shared what was purported to be a draft letter from MPEG LA President Larry Horn to pool members which stated the following: “Regrettably, with more than one year’s experience marketing the DASH License according to its revised …

Announcing a new online course entitled, Computing and Using Video Quality Metrics: A Course for Encoding Professionals. The course contains over four hours of video instruction and costs $99.95. The course teaches you how to choose, compute, and interpret video quality metrics like VMAF, SSIMPLUS, PSNR, and SSIM. Here are some of the key items you will learn. The pros and …

One of the first operations I learned in FFmpeg was how to scale subsampled video files back to the source resolution to compute PSNR in the Moscow State University (MSU) Video Quality Measurement Tool (VQMT). Thankfully, for those not familiar with FFmpeg, as of VQMT version 11.1, this operation is no longer necessary. Yup, VQMT can now autoscale your lower-resolution …

This article details how the FFmpeg threads command impacts performance, overall quality, and transient quality for live and VOD encoding. The level of testing and analysis detailed here is consistent with the instruction in my book, Learn to Produce Videos with FFmpeg In 30 Minutes or Less ($34.95), and my course, FFmpeg for Adaptive Bitrate Production ($29.95)  (which includes a …

This article has been superseded by this article entitled, An FFmpeg Script to Render and Package a Complete HLS Presentation. So there I was, teaching a class at Streaming Media East entitled How To Build A Free Encoder/Packager With Watch Folder Operation Using Open Source Tools (handout and video available here). An attendee asked about creating an HLS manifest with …