Companies attempting to formulate the ideal encoding ladder for specific videos or classes of content should incorporate both the harmonic mean VMAF score for overall quality and the percentile score to minimize transient quality issues.   I’ve spent much of the last few weeks benchmarking H.264 and HEVC cloud-based per-title encoding capabilities like those available from AWS Elemental, Microsoft Azure, Brightcove, …

I’m a big fan of the Video Insiders podcast and have learned a lot from many of the episodes. I’m proud to have joined Dror Gill and Mark Donnigan for episode 70, which you can listen to or download here. Here’s the description: EPISODE SUMMARY The Video Insiders podcast is celebrating 70(!) episodes with a very special guest – Jan …

This post presents a return on investment view of choosing an x265 preset that delivers the optimal blend of encoding cost and storage and bandwidth savings. The first chart, x265 Encoding Time/Quality Tradeoff, is from a lesson in my course Streaming Media 101: Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals.  Given the bandwidth and storage savings that higher-quality x265 presets deliver, …