Recent Posts

New Five-Star Review for FFmpeg Book

One thing that never gets old is a five-star review on Amazon. I just received another one for my book, Learn to Produce Video with FFmpeg: In Thirty Minutes or Less (2018 Edition), which is available on Amazon ($34.95) and for PDF download ($29.95). In this review from a verified purchaser, the customer said: “I would consider this book a …

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Lesson of the Week: Codecs are Not Generic

I discuss the bandwidth savings delivered by VP9 and HEVC over H264 in my course Streaming Media 101: Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals. I wanted to illustrate this with my own tests, so I used FFmpeg to encode H.264, HEVC, and VP9 output using about 25 short test files. This felt like a good time to discuss the difference …

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Lesson of the Week: More Efficient Chart Title Creation in Excel

I just finished one consulting project that involved testing 22 clips with three codecs to produce nine rate-distortion charts per clip (1080p, 720p, 480p for VMAF, SSIM, and PSNR) and am working another with 35 clips with 4 RD charts each with two encoding modes. So efficient chart creation in Excel is now a huge priority. One frustration with Excel …

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