Encoding

This is the second in a five-part series on how to cut your encoding and streaming costs. The first article was Saving on Encoding: Adjust Encoding Configuration to Increase Capacity. Article summary: Capped CRF encoding is a single-pass encoding method that can save encoding costs compared to two-pass VBR. Capped CRF is also a simple per-title encoding method that can reduce …

This is the first of five articles on how to cut your encoding and streaming costs. [dt_quote type=”pullquote” layout=”left” font_size=”big” animation=”none” size=”1″]This article discusses how you can cut x264 encoding costs by 73% without noticeable quality degradation and triple your x265 capacity while actually improving real world video quality. [/dt_quote] A key focus of my book Video Encoding by the Numbers …

Sorenson Squeeze was one of the first encoding tools that many streaming professionals used and now it’s officially end-of-lifed as you can see from the featured image atop this page (from here). It’s not really a surprise; in 2015, I interviewed new Sorenson CEO Marcus Liassides who described how Sorenson would be focusing on building tools to drive the future of …

As corporations move their compute resources into public and private clouds, and other virtual environments, most encoding vendors are doing the same with their encoders, though not all markets are moving at the same speed. In my Streaming Media article, A Hybrid Approach Guides the Changing Face of On-Prem Encoding, I spoke with about 13 vendors, including Harmonic, Telestream, encoding.com, Comprimato, …

If you’ve been following my work, you know that I’m very bullish on per-title encoding and optimization technologies, and have reviewed them several times. One technology that I haven’t tested before is from Crunch Media Works, which offers video optimization tools that can be used on public and private computer servers, as well as mobile devices, to reduce the bandwidth …

For all talk about the new AV1 codec or HEVC in HLS, the simplest and fastest way to save bandwidth costs and improve your viewer’s QoE is to deploy video optimization or per-title encoding. I explore why in a column now up on StreamingMedia.com. You can implement a simple form of per-title encoding with FFmpeg using Capped CRF (for Constant …

At NAB 2018 I gave a talk on applying quality metrics to 2D and VR video, and the video has just become available. So here’s the session description, and the video and a link to the handout is below. Choosing the number of streams in an adaptive group and configuring them is usually a subjective, touchy-feely exercise, with no way …

Figure 1. BD-rate savings from AV1 as published by Facebook. When Facebook compared the AV1 codec to VP9 and two flavors of H264, their researcher precisely stated, “In terms of PSNR, the average BD-rate savings of AV1 relative to x264 main, x264 high and libvpx-vp9 were 51.0%, 47.0% and 29.9%, respectively.” This means that AV1 delivered the same quality as …

This was a pre-conference workshop; here’s the description, download the handout below. Note that there are two sets of handouts, one from Jan, the other from RealEyes. W3. Encoding Live & VOD For HEVC/HLS Monday, May 7: 1:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. Apple’s support for HEVC in HLS is a groundbreaking event that opens up hundreds of millions of HEVC-capable players. …

Another of my sessions at Streaming Media. Here’s the description, download PDF below. T203. HOW-TO: Comparing Per-Title Encoding Options Wednesday, May 9: 1:45 p.m. – 2:45 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 …