Recent Posts

Understanding the Economics of Transcoding

A real-world comparison of the cost per stream and OPEX associated with different transcoding techniques.

Whether your business model is FAST or subscription-based premium content, your success depends upon your ability to deliver a high-quality viewing experience while relentlessly reducing costs. Transcoding is one of the most expensive production-related costs and the ultimate determinant of video quality, so obviously plays a huge role on both sides of this equation. This article identifies the most relevant …

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The Impact of GOP Size on Video Quality

This freely downloadable report measures the qualitative impact of GOP sizes on animated, general entertainment, sports, and office footage for H.264 and HEVC. One of the most fundamental encoding decisions is GOP size or the frequency of I-frames in our encoded files. I-frames, also called keyframes, start each “group of pictures” comprised of I-, B-, and P-frames. Most of the …

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Free “Must-Have” Applications for Video Engineers

Here are the free “must-have” apps I install on every Windows computer (and three for-fee tools for deeper analysis).  I just received a new Dell Precision 7820 server and had to prepare it for video transcoding and analysis. Here are the tools I installed to get up and running. I present the list and links first and then a list …

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