Encoding

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 …

Reducing the reference frame setting from 16 to 1 when using x.264’s veryslow preset decreased encoding time by 46% on ten 2-minute test files while dropping the average VMAF score from 96.06 to 95.97, a decrease of less than .001. If you used the Medium preset, at the default setting of 3 reference frames, changing to ref=1 would drop encoding …

I’m teaching two boot camps (virtually) at an upcoming Streaming Media Connect event, one for VOD and the other for live streaming; each costs $199. The courses are designed for newbies who need to get up to speed quickly on these topics. If the courses sound familiar, I taught both courses at Streaming Media West in October, though I’ve updated …

While 2018 was the year AV1 became known, 2020 will be the year that AV1 became interesting, primarily because of three developments. First, in early 2020, AV1-enabled smart TVs hit the market, right on the 2-year schedule announced back in 2018 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). Second, over the past two years, encoding times for the AOMedia AV1 …

For this review, I took a first look at encoding VVC (Ver­sa­tile Video Coding). Specifically, I compared Fraunhofer HHI’s implementation of the VVC codec (Versatile Video Encoder; VV­enC) against the Alliance for Open Media’s (AO­Media) aom­enc codec and the x.264 and x.265 codecs in FF­mpeg. I found VVenC to be simple to use and much faster than expected. Its output …

Just a quick note to celebrate the first review of my Encoding with the AV1 Codec course ($99.95). By way of background, I designed the course to help familiarize students with the confusing array of AV1 encoding parameters and to offer sample command strings that I have proven over weeks of testing. In other words, to save time, which is …

I’m teaching two boot camps (virtually) at an upcoming Streaming Media University event, one for VOD and the other for live streaming; each costs $199. The courses are designed for newbies who need to get up to speed quickly on these topics. If the courses sound familiar, I did teach the same courses at the Streaming Media West event in …

Recently I received a shortlist of compression-related questions from a consulting buddy; he’s always been gracious in answering my questions and I wanted to return the favor. Since he’s asking, I thought others might be curious as well; hence this blog post that largely incorporates my responses to his questions, all relating to encoding H.264 files. Here are the questions: …