Learning

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Get Your Streaming Media Certification

If you’re onboarding new hires in streaming media-related positions, you now have an affordable option for providing and monitoring that streaming-specific training. If you’re a professional seeking to upgrade your skills and gain accreditation, you have that option as well.  Over the last few years, streaming media has become critical for entertainment and communications, with the quarantines necessitated by Covid-19 …

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Five Star Review of Streaming Media 101-Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals

The first review is up for my new course, Streaming Media 101 – Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals, and it’s a five-star review. I designed the course to provide technical fundamentals and an overview of key industry products and services and the companies that create and support them. The goal was to teach students skills like live and VOD …

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Lesson of the Week: Sounding Good Online – Exploring Your Mic Options

In a previous lesson, I explored how to optimize quality on a webcam; this lesson tackles the audio side. Rather than simply discuss the various options I recorded multiple segments using the mics shown below so you can hear the difference. I shot all segments under the same conditions, in my office with fluorescent lights running, which caused the faint hum …

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Interview with Streaming Media About New Course: Streaming Media 101

I spoke with Streaming Media Magazine’s Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen about the new course, Streaming Media 101: Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals. The video is available on YouTube so I embedded it below. If you’d rather read the transcript, click here to see the article on the Streaming Media website.  Eric’s second question was “what’s the elevator pitch?” Here’s the …

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New Course – Streaming Media 101: Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals

I’m launching a new video course called Streaming Media 101: Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals. As the name suggests, the course teaches the technical background and skills necessary to successfully perform in a streaming-media related job, whether it’s producing and distributing video, or in a company creating the tools or services necessary to produce and distribute streaming media. Streaming …

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Lesson of the Week: Looking Good on Camera or Webcam

For obvious reasons, a lot more of us will be presenting online over the next few months than ever before. This short video provides some simple techniques you can use to look your best. These images are from a book I published back in 2015 entitled Mastering Webcam and Smartphone Video: How to Look and Sound Great in Webinars and …

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Lesson of the Week: Computing VMAF with FFmpeg

This lesson teaches you how to compute VMAF with FFmpeg. It includes a download link to a specially compiled version of FFmpeg that can compute VMAF and to a zipped file that contains the batch files and input/output files shown in the lesson. I’m adding it as a lesson to my course Computing and Using Video Quality Metrics. If you’re …

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Lesson of the Week: CMAF Proof of Concept

The Common Media Application Format (CMAF) is supposed to be the Holy Grail of streaming; one set of files that you can deliver to multiple output points. How well does it work today? This 3:47 video shows you. I started by creating CMAF output in AWS Elemental MediaConvert. Why? Because they supply useful templates, have an easy to use UI, …

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Choosing the Optimal CRF Value for Capped CRF Encoding

In a blog full of wonky compression articles, this could be the wonkiest article of all. If you’re not using capped CRF encoding, or considering the same, it’s almost certainly not of interest. If you are using capped CRF encoding (for constant rate factor), however, you almost certainly will find it interesting and perhaps even illuminating. A quick background note. …

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The Ten Most Popular Articles from 2019

It’s always good to review which articles readers found valuable over the past year to help focus on producing similar content in the future. By publishing the top ten, hopefully, those reading this article will see some articles they might find useful. So, without further ado, here were the top ten articles from the Streaming Learning Center blog in 2019. …

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