Encoding

alt

Compressionists: You’re Only as Good as Your Tools

I’m reviewing AV1 encoders for Streaming Media Magazine and was performing some QC on the AV1 files that I produced with the latest version of FFmpeg. Two file details I always check are GOP size and whether the GOPs are closed or not. I check these for multiple reasons.

Read More »

Telecine: MediaMelon SmartPlay Case Study

This article details how Brazilian OTT operator Telecine deployed MediaMelon SmartPlay and decreased bandwidth costs by about 42% while improving the MOS quality of the video delivered. SmartPlay also helped Telecine manage the 4X increase in demand due to COVID-19. This is the third and final story about MediaMelon SmartPlay. The first article describes how SmartPlay works and the benefits …

Read More »

Choosing the Optimal Preset for AV1 Encoding (and Other Questions)

AV1 encoding is now only 2x slower than x265. See the latest results here.  I’m comparing AV1 encoders for Streaming Media Magazine. I plan to include codecs from: The Alliance for Open Media (hopefully versions 1.0/2.0) Visionular Intel Mozilla (Mozilla is out – didn’t respond to my inquiry). If there are any other codecs that should be considered, please get …

Read More »

Integrating SmartPlay into Your Encoding and Distribution Ecosystem

In the previous post, I described what MediaMelon SmartPlay is and identified some of the benefits. In this post, I’ll discuss pricing and how to integrate SmartPlay into your encoding, delivery, and playback infrastructure. Pricing Overview Let’s briefly discuss the SmartPlay pricing model here and look at ROI at the end of this document. There are two pricing models. The …

Read More »

How MediaMelon SmartPlay Saves Bandwidth Costs and Improves QoE

MediaMelon’s SmartPlay is a streaming optimization solution that reduces bandwidth use by 35% or more and improves QoE while working with your existing ABR content without reencoding. As you’ll read in this post, SmartPlay works by analyzing the quality of every segment in an ABR package and producing a hintfile used by the SmartPlay plug-in installed in the player to …

Read More »

Preliminary VMAF and PSNR Scores for New Xilinx Transcoding Appliances

Live streaming at scale is the perfect application for hardware transcoders that deliver highly-affordable encoding density. Xilinx just announced a series of transcoding appliances targeting these live streaming use cases built around the new Xilinx Real-Time (RT) Server reference architecture. I’ve been benchmarking output quality with two card-based encoders deployed in these appliances, the Alveo U30 and Alveo U50. The …

Read More »

Join Me at a Webinar Discussing MediaMelon SmartPlay

MediaMelon SmartPlay is a streaming optimization solution that reduces bandwidth costs by 35% or more and improves QoE while working with your existing ABR content without re-encoding. SmartPlay works with any existing encoder, including those with content-adaptive encoding (also called per-title), and most existing players and CDNs. Briefly, SmartPlay works by analyzing the quality of your live or VOD ABR …

Read More »

How to Install Python 3.8 and Bento 4.

Read More »

Smart TVs with AV1 Support Now Shipping

Many 2021 model Smart TVs support AV1 decoding, making it a good time to start thinking about how to encode AV1 videos. A great way to start is our course Encoding with the AV1 Codec, which details how to encode AV1 encoded video with FFmpeg (libaom-av1), the Alliance for Open Media’s standalone aomenc encoder, Intel’s SVT-AV1, and Visionular’s Aurora1.  Would …

Read More »

Upcoming Training for Streaming Production

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 be teaching plus a short …

Read More »