Would you design a SmartTV that couldn’t play UHD videos from YouTube? Me neither and designers from LG and Samsung apparently agree. I was researching codec support among smart TVs for upcoming training sessions at Streaming Media East and noticed that the 2020 version of the Samsung SmartTV supports AV1 decode. A quick search found an…
Just a quick announcement that the Alliance for Open Media has launched version 2.0 of the AOMedia AV1 encoder that you can download here. According to the Phoronix website, from which I grabbed this news: “Libaom 2.0 is the first release since the original 1.0 release back in mid-2018 after the AOMedia codec working group…
I discuss the bandwidth savings delivered by VP9 and HEVC over H264 in my course Streaming Media 101: Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals. I wanted to illustrate this with my own tests, so I used FFmpeg to encode H.264, HEVC, and VP9 output using about 25 short test files. This felt like a good…
If you’re comparing codecs with video quality metrics, you should consider tuning for that metric. However, x264 and x265 don’t have a VMAF tuning option. According to my analysis, it appears that tuning for PSNR is the best option and one you should strongly consider. When working with VP9, there’s an additional complication; tuning for…
This is a long post only of interest to those attempting to optimize their VP9 encodes. The three key takeaways are 1) use the command script shown on the bottom of the page, 2) a speed setting of 2 offers the optimal quality/performance tradeoff, and 3) the row-mt setting improves performance significantly with zero quality…
Nine members of the MPEG LA HEVC patent pool are leaving the pool and now will be included within the HEVC Advance HEVC pool. This changes the balance of power between these two pools, though licensees who signed with the MPEG LA pool before the departures will continue to have coverage for these patents going forward. The MPEG…
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…
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…
My article, What is VVC, just published on Streaming Media. Briefly, VVC is “codec next” from the perspective of MPEG (see image above) that’s due out in mid-to-late 2020. The Streaming Media article identifies the new “tools” in the codec, early performance results, and what we know about licensing. It’s way too early for most…
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…
