Recent Posts

VP9 Finally Comes of Age, But Is it Right for Everyone?

Publishers and encoding companies alike are beginning to embrace VP9, Google’s open source codec. Here’s how it stacks up on quality and data rates. The value proposition for VP9 is clear, as stated in Figure 1: “Adaptive HD streaming with 1/2 the data of H.264!” Half the data rate cuts your bandwidth and storage costs and allows you to reach …

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The Decline of the Standards-Based Codec—and Good Riddance

Online is different from broadcast and doesn’t need formal standards. HEVC isn’t considered by many online video streamers, as the future belongs to VP9 and AV1. Elsewhere in the issue, you find a 4,000-word article I wrote on VP9 that doesn’t mention HEVC. Why? Because for the vast majority of streaming producers that don’t distribute 4K video to smart TVs, …

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Review: V-Nova Perseus: Does its Compression Live Up to the Hype?

London-based V-Nova has made some impressive claims about Perseus, its compression technology. Streaming Media’s preliminary testing shows that it lives up to some of them. V-Nova launched its compression technology, Perseus, on April Fools’ Day 2015, claiming “2x–3x average compression gains, at all quality levels, under practical real-time operating scenarios versus H.264, HEVC and JPEG2000.” The timing and the claims …

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