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 …

In the desktop/mobile streaming marketplace, most producers provide two sets of streams; HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) for Apple iOS devices and Android devices and either Flash or Silverlight for the desktop. A number of content and technology companies have gotten together to promote a specification called DASH, which stands for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP. Its promise is a single …