Learning

I’m pulling together some materials for my pre-conference session at Streaming Media West (November 18-20 in Los Angeles) entitled Objective Quality Metrics 2D & 3D: What They Are, How To Compute Them, & How To Use Them. One lesson talks about “tuning” when encoding files to be measured with metrics like PSNR, VMAF, and SSIM. It’s a crucial issue to …

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 …

I’m pulling together some materials for my pre-conference session at Streaming Media West (November 18-20 in Los Angeles) entitled Introduction to ABR Production and Delivery. One lesson shows the technology ecosystem needed to implement OTT streaming and identifies key vendors for each function. I figured I’d throw these slides out there to get comments on the topics covered (and not …

Reviewer Ian Kennedy recently reviewed Learn to Produce Video with FFmpeg on Amazon, and he hit the nail on the head in his five-star review, saying: Who this book is for: 1) The decision maker who may be skeptical about using FFmpeg in a production environment compared to a turn-key commercial solution. 2) The video-adjacent engineer who has been asked …

So, there I was downloading videos from YouTube to include in a PowerPoint for a training course I was producing. Unfortunately, my download tool, wondershare’s excellent video converter, downloaded separate audio and video streams, the video in an MP4 wrapper and the audio as an MP3 file. So I had to mux the two to input them into PowerPoint. A …

Streaming Media West is coming up next month in the City of Los Angeles (as opposed to Huntington Beach where it’s been the last few years). Specifically, it’s at the Westin Bonaventure on November 19-20 (Tuesday/Wednesday) with pre-conference sessions on Monday the 18th. I’ll be my normal busy self with two pre-conference sessions and several presentations. Here are the dates, …

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 …

Derrick Freeman is a luminary in the Streaming Video world, an expert on Wowza Streaming Engine and Telestream Wirecast (among other products) who has consulted with and instructed dozens of companies, universities, and other organizations. When Derrick needed to learn how to use FFmpeg, he purchased a copy of my book, Learn to Produce Video with FFmpeg in 30 Minutes …

This article discusses the evolution of the encoding ladder from the fixed ladder presented by Apple in Tech Note TN2224 to context-aware-encoding, which creates a ladder that not only considers the encoding complexity of the content, but also the producer’s QoE and QoS metrics. The encoding ladder embodies the most significant encoding decisions made by encoding professionals, and understanding this …

After three years or so in gestation, per-title encoding is becoming a required feature on most encoding platforms, whether in-house software or SaaS cloud providers. In this buyers’ guide, we’ll review a list of features to look for in per-title encoding offerings and present a testing structure to evaluate the contenders that make it to your short list. If you’re …