One visual quality metric that’s getting a bit more love lately is the Structured Similarity Index (SSIM). For example, when Facebook launched their first VR Metric, SSIM360, they based it on SSIM. I’ve generally avoided using SSIM because the scoring range is too small for my liking (0 – 1) and I wasn’t aware of any way to map SSIM scores …

The internet is full of free FFmpeg documentation. Why should you pay $34.95 for my book (or $29.95 for the PDF)? Because it will help you get your work done fast and get it right the first time. This book eliminates the time you’d spend hunting for answers on Superuser or Stack Overflow and teaches you to make informed encoding decisions …

For all talk about the new AV1 codec or HEVC in HLS, the simplest and fastest way to save bandwidth costs and improve your viewer’s QoE is to deploy video optimization or per-title encoding. I explore why in a column now up on StreamingMedia.com. You can implement a simple form of per-title encoding with FFmpeg using Capped CRF (for Constant …