I recently recorded about ten interviews for a webinar produced by a client. I could have used Zoom or Skype but thought that I could achieve better quality by producing the videos with vMix Call. Briefly, vMix is a live streaming software package and Call is the feature that lets you connect with others via RTC for recording conferences. Some …

MediaMelon’s SmartPlay is a streaming optimization solution that reduces bandwidth use by 35% or more and improves QoE while working with your existing ABR content without reencoding. As you’ll read in this post, SmartPlay works by analyzing the quality of every segment in an ABR package and producing a hintfile used by the SmartPlay plug-in installed in the player to …

Live streaming at scale is the perfect application for hardware transcoders that deliver highly-affordable encoding density. Xilinx just announced a series of transcoding appliances targeting these live streaming use cases built around the new Xilinx Real-Time (RT) Server reference architecture. I’ve been benchmarking output quality with two card-based encoders deployed in these appliances, the Alveo U30 and Alveo U50. The …