This is the first of five articles on how to cut your encoding and streaming costs. A key focus of my book Video Encoding by the Numbers was to isolate the qualitative impact of critical encoding decisions, particularly when they significantly impact encoding time. For example, if a configuration improves quality by 1%, it likely…
Sorenson Squeeze was one of the first encoding tools that many streaming professionals used and now it’s officially end-of-lifed as you can see from the featured image atop this page (from here). It’s not really a surprise; in 2015, I interviewed new Sorenson CEO Marcus Liassides who described how Sorenson would be focusing on building tools…
As corporations move their compute resources into public and private clouds, and other virtual environments, most encoding vendors are doing the same with their encoders, though not all markets are moving at the same speed. In my Streaming Media article, A Hybrid Approach Guides the Changing Face of On-Prem Encoding, I spoke with about 13 vendors,…
If you’ve been following my work, you know that I’m very bullish on per-title encoding and optimization technologies, and have reviewed them several times. One technology that I haven’t tested before is from Crunch Media Works, which offers video optimization tools that can be used on public and private computer servers, as well as mobile…
For all talk about the new AV1 codec or HEVC in HLS, the simplest and fastest way to save bandwidth costs and improve your viewer’s QoE is to deploy video optimization or per-title encoding. I explore why in a column now up on StreamingMedia.com. You can implement a simple form of per-title encoding with FFmpeg…
At NAB 2018 I gave a talk on applying quality metrics to 2D and VR video, and the video has just become available. So here’s the session description, and the video and a link to the handout is below. Choosing the number of streams in an adaptive group and configuring them is usually a subjective,…
Figure 1. BD-rate savings from AV1 as published by Facebook. When Facebook compared the AV1 codec to VP9 and two flavors of H264, their researcher precisely stated, “In terms of PSNR, the average BD-rate savings of AV1 relative to x264 main, x264 high and libvpx-vp9 were 51.0%, 47.0% and 29.9%, respectively.” This means that AV1…
This was a pre-conference workshop; here’s the description, download the handout below. Note that there are two sets of handouts, one from Jan, the other from RealEyes. W3. Encoding Live & VOD For HEVC/HLS Monday, May 7: 1:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. Apple’s support for HEVC in HLS is a groundbreaking event that opens up hundreds…
Another of my sessions at Streaming Media. Here’s the description, download PDF below. T203. HOW-TO: Comparing Per-Title Encoding Options Wednesday, May 9: 1:45 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. Per-title encoding techniques customize the encoding ladder to match the encoding complexity of the source, saving bandwidth on easy-to compress videos and ensuring the quality of more complex…
One of my three sessions at Streaming Media East. Here’s the description; link to handout below. Note: one issue that came up during the discussion was the ability for systems to handle multiple language and captions. After the presentation, I heard from a representative from Go Easy Live who stated, “As additional informational, I confirm…