I’ve been a fan of video optimization technologies for a while now, and consider optimization simpler, cheaper, and potentially just as effective as adding a new codec like HEVC or VP9. I’m pleased to see that the Crunch Mediaworks Video Enhancement Solutions App is now available on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. I reviewed Crunch‘s technology back in 2019 for video …

Just a brief announcement that I’ve updated the course, Computing and Using Video Quality Metrics: A Course for Encoding Professionals, that teaches encoding professionals how to measure and apply metrics like VMAF, SSIMPLUS, MS SSIM, SSIM, and Apple’s AVQT. The updates include: Lessons on computing and applying Apple’s AVQT metric. A lesson on computing the weighted average bandwidth and quality …

This article describes what youtube-dl is, and outlines several basic youtube-dl commands for audio/video/subtitle downloads. I’ve always been fascinated with how YouTube encodes the endless hours of videos uploaded to the site. YouTube employs the best and the brightest and their task is positively Sisyphean. For years, I’ve gotten a glimpse of YouTube’s encoding practices via download tools like the …