I don’t spend a lot of time in the big-iron encoding space, but I was pleasantly surprised a few weeks ago when I saw Elemental Technologies, who sells GPU-based hardware encoders, written about in BusinessWeek. So when the company approached Streaming Media Magazine with an exclusive story about ESPN using their technology, I was psyched to chat with company president …

This article discusses what data rate is and why it’s important, and what bits per pixel measures and how to compute it.  What is Data Rate? Data rate (or bit rate) is the amount of data per second of video, usually expressed in kilobits (kbps) or megabits per second (Mbps). When I say that ESPN distributes their video at 800 …

According to the latest statistics from NetMarketShare, the current penetration of HTML5-compatible browsers in the desktop market is 58.1% maximum. To completely serve these browers, you’d have to encode in three formats, with 47.5% of desktops compatible with WebM, 44.1% compatible with H.264, and 8.3% compatible with Ogg (this is the Firefox 3.6 crowd). To calculate these numbers, I created …