I’ve been pondering what drives codec adoption since I joined compression company Iterated Systems back in 1993. Tonight, I have the opportunity to explore the subject in detail at a meetup sponsored by Bitmovin as an adjunct to the Demuxed conference here in San Francisco. Entitled The Battle of the Codecs: AV1 vs VVC, the…
I recently wrote an article for Streaming Media where I tested AV1 playback from YouTube in Chrome. I mentioned that I couldn’t make Firefox Nightly work, though it also should play the YouTube content. Some folks from Mozilla got in touch and detailed the steps to make it work. 1. Download Firefox Nightly here. 2. Go to…
New Service by Unified Patents Assists Companies with Patent-Related Royalty Claims Monday, September 10, 20182:00 PM ESTRegister below Companies deploying HEVC and other video technologies face skyrocketing licensing costs and uncertainty about future demands. In 2017, Apple paid Nokia $2 billion dollars in unexpected H.264 royalties, while last month Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei was ordered to…
In his Essential Patent Blog, intellectual property attorney David Long recently reported that a jury trial in Federal District Court in Texas found that Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei infringed upon an H.264-related patent owned by PanOptis, a non-practicing entity (NPE). The jury also found that the H264 award wasn’t limited by FRAND requirements typically applied…
I’m not going to IBC, but if you are, please check out AV1 hardware encoding acceleration from Socionext. Here’s the blurb from the press release. There will be a demonstration of the world’s first hardware-based implementation of an AV1 encoding system. AV1 is a new, advanced video data compression standard established by theAlliance for Open Media,…
My first look of the AV1 codec is up on Streaming Media Magazine. Here’s the pithy summary. “These tests revealed glimpses of very alluring quality as compared to existing codecs, but at a current encoding cost that’s far beyond what the vast majority of video publishers can afford to pay. How many devices will play…
Number of hours of streaming required to recoup 60-minute encoding cost. Author’s note: The author would like to acknowledge the shocking fact that he is not perfect and that this lack of perfection often reveals itself, quite embarrassingly, in spreadsheet-intensive articles. I did the best I could and checked every number and assumption multiple times, but…
MPEG is working on a new coding standard called Versatile Video Coding (VVC). A colleague recently sent me a presentation from Thierry Fautier, VP Video Strategy at Harmonic, which contained some preliminary encoding results to be formally presented at a paper given at IBC. The presentation was from a short talk Thierry gave at the Mile High…
AV1 has been all consuming from a mindshare perspective for many streaming professionals, but the fact of the matter is that unless you’re distributing stream quantities on par with Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, and Hulu, AV1 won’t be relevant for at least two years, maybe longer. I discuss why in my Streaming Media article, Return of the…
A recent report published by Unisphere Research and Streaming Media magazine, and sponsored by Beamr, reveals some interesting data on HEVC adoption. Entitled Real-World HEVC Insights: Adoption, Implications, and Workflows, the report is available for free download on StreamingMedia.com (registration required) and is authored by my colleague Tim Siglin, a Streaming Media contributing editor and…