Encoding

I have a confession to make. Though I’ve attended dozens of Streaming Media conferences, I’ve never attended a kickoff session. Not, of course, because the content wasn’t information and insightful, but because I’m always scurrying about trying to finish my own presentations. This dubious accomplishment ends at Streaming Media West next month, when Roger Pantos, the inventor of HTTP Live …

As we transition from H.264 to VP9, HEVC, AV1, and soon VVC (Versatile Video Coding), it’s important to understand the fundamentals of codec comparisons and how to evaluate their effectiveness and utility. In this expanded column I’ll cover both. Evaluating the Evaluation Let’s begin with how to evaluate the evaluation. I start by identifying the evaluator and its affiliations, giving …

I’ve been pondering what drives codec adoption since I joined compression company Iterated Systems back in 1993. Tonight, I have the opportunity to explore the subject in detail at a meetup sponsored by Bitmovin as an adjunct to the Demuxed conference here in San Francisco. Entitled The Battle of the Codecs: AV1 vs VVC, the meetup will be held tonight …

Lots going on in the codec world, lots to analyze. But for the most part in this article, I’m going to let the pictures do the talking. New HEVC Codec Leaders Emerge I’m a big fan of Moscow State University tools and reports. Unlike many codec analysts, MSU asks the codec vendors to suggest the settings used for the encodes, …

I recently wrote an article for Streaming Media where I tested AV1 playback from YouTube in Chrome. I mentioned that I couldn’t make Firefox Nightly work, though it also should play the YouTube content. Some folks from Mozilla got in touch and detailed the steps to make it work. 1.  Download Firefox Nightly here. 2.  Go to about:config and click “I accept the …

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A recent consulting project involved computing the VMAF, SSIM, and PSNR scores of 30 fps 480p video encoded from a 60 fps 1080p source file. I’ve not performed measurements like this in the past and assumed that simply converting the 60 fps sources file to 30 fps via the “-r” option would convert from 60 fps to 30 fps and …

I’m not going to IBC, but if you are, please check out AV1 hardware encoding acceleration from Socionext. Here’s the blurb from the press release.  There will be a demonstration of the world’s first hardware-based implementation of an AV1 encoding system. AV1 is a new, advanced video data compression standard established by theAlliance for Open Media, a consortium that includes Socionext, …

My first look of the AV1 codec is up on Streaming Media Magazine. Here’s the pithy summary.  “These tests revealed glimpses of very alluring quality as compared to existing codecs, but at a current encoding cost that’s far beyond what the vast majority of video publishers can afford to pay. How many devices will play AV1 without some form of …

Number of hours of streaming required to recoup 60-minute encoding cost.  Author’s note: The author would like to acknowledge the shocking fact that he is not perfect and that this lack of perfection often reveals itself, quite embarrassingly, in spreadsheet-intensive articles. I did the best I could and checked every number and assumption multiple times, but if something doesn’t look right, …