Here are descriptions of the two courses I’ll be teaching in a few days on streaming media production. Streaming Media East will be held online, with five 3-hour pre-conference training sessions that cost $199 each and a robust assortment of free 1-hour sessions. Here are the titles, dates, and times of the pre-conference sessions I’ll…
Streaming media production and delivery has become even more critical over the last few months; here’s an opportunity to boost your skills and knowledge via live online training by recognized industry experts. I’m sad that Streaming Media East won’t be held in Boston as planned; I really enjoy those shows. However, Streaming Media East will…
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…
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…
If you’re onboarding new hires in streaming media-related positions, you now have an affordable option for providing and monitoring that streaming-specific training. If you’re a professional seeking to upgrade your skills and gain accreditation, you have that option as well. Over the last few years, streaming media has become critical for entertainment and communications, with…
We’re all aware of the sudden need to reduce streaming bandwidth to alleviate congestion. MediaMelon’s SmartPlay/QBR is a very viable option for this that was recently adopted by Brazilian OTT producer Telecine. I reviewed MediaMelon’s QBR technology for Streaming Media Magazine back in 2017. I called it a “server-side, per-title delivery mechanism.” Unlike traditional per-title…
If you’re comparing codecs with video quality metrics, you should consider tuning for that metric. However, x264 and x265 don’t have a VMAF tuning option. According to my analysis, it appears that tuning for PSNR is the best option and one you should strongly consider. When working with VP9, there’s an additional complication; tuning for…
Producing the chart above involved encoding 35 files using 5 different presets and then recording start and stop times. Since the files were about 20-seconds long, seconds were important. I’m sure a smarter compressionist than I could write a Python script to harvest the start and stop times but I do it by hand, which…
This is a long post only of interest to those attempting to optimize their VP9 encodes. The three key takeaways are 1) use the command script shown on the bottom of the page, 2) a speed setting of 2 offers the optimal quality/performance tradeoff, and 3) the row-mt setting improves performance significantly with zero quality…
The Common Media Application Format (CMAF) is supposed to be the Holy Grail of streaming; one set of files that you can deliver to multiple output points. How well does it work today? This 3:47 video shows you. I started by creating CMAF output in AWS Elemental MediaConvert. Why? Because they supply useful templates, have…
