Streaming Media West was a high-energy conference with a great vibe and the usual elegance of the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Resort & Spa. I gave two talks; a 3-hour preconference session entitled Advanced Codec Implementation & Production and a 45-minute session on Encoding AV1 with Open Source Alternatives. Below are the descriptions and links to the presentation downloads. W1. …

This article shows the quality/encoding time tradeoffs for producers choosing a preset for SVT-AV1 and libaom-AV1. Note to readers – 12/13 – AOM has released version 1.4, which fixed the SVT-AV1 preset issues reported in the first version of this article.  Presets are the most important configuration option for controlling quality and throughput for most codecs. For this reason, when …

This article details a methodology for comparing hardware transcoders considering cost/stream, watt/stream, and output quality. If you’ve ever benchmarked software codecs, you know the quality/throughput tradeoff; simply stated, the higher the quality, the lower the throughput. In contrast, for many first-generation hardware encoders, throughput was prioritized, but the quality was fixed; you got what you got. Finding the Key Quality …