I know time is short, but I’ve gotten in touch with most vendors that offer this feature and am posting this (and using social media) so the word is out. Anyone who wants to participate, there’s still time. Here’s the description of the session: T203. HOW-TO: Comparing Per-Title Encoding Options Wednesday, May 9: 1:45 p.m.…
While at NAB, I produced a short video with Beamr CTO Dror Gil and Dirk Griffioen from Unified Streaming, which sells a variety of streaming-related software, including modules for ABR packaging. The primary topic was encoding and packaging with HEVC in HLS. Dror also gave a brief demo of Beamr’s new Transcoder product. During the talk, we covered…
From a Streaming Media perspective, NAB 2018 was all about the launch of the AV1 codec from the Alliance for Open Media. While at the show, I spoke with many different people from many different companies about the launch, and about other codec-related announcements at the show. You can read all about that in my…
VR and 360° video has all of the compression-related issues of flat video, and then some. Facebook’s new metrics, called SSIM360 and 360QVM, might simplify quality analysis for developers in the future, particularly if Facebook open sources the metrics. In a blog post called “Quality Assessment of 360° Video View Sessions,” Facebook will announce two objective quality…
With streaming video data rates, less is always more, unless of course, lower data rates mean visible artifacts. I just finished a review of the ZPEG Engine for x264, which produced bitrate savings of 21% without blocks, banding, mosquitoes, or other problems that would be noticeable by typical viewers. This was an average saving; the…
We’ve known Beamr as an optimization company, and in 2016 they bought Vanguard Video, a codec company. Traditionally, Beamr sold SDKs to large customers, but now they’re launching a cloud transcoding service. I recently interviewed CTO Dror Gill about the new service; here’s the video.
According to Moscow State University (MSU), AV1 is the highest quality codec available, besting both HEVC and VP9—when considering quality only, and not encoding speed,. More interesting is that in normal operating modes, VP9 produced higher quality than HEVC. These are just two of several compelling findings from the recently completed MSU 2017 Codec Comparison…
The creativity behind immersive VR filmmaking is only matched by the software engineering creativity that makes this type of video possible. I just started a consulting project relating to 360° VR video, and have some introductory conclusions. I am only an egg, as Robert Heinlein might say, but I thought I would share them. First,…
One of the more intriguing streaming-related numbers out there is the Netflix ISP Speed Index which topped out at a paltry 3.98 Mbps in the US during December 2017 (Figure 1). According to Netflix, “The Netflix ISP Speed Index lists the average prime-time bitrate for Netflix content streamed to Netflix members during a particular month. For…
At its June 2017 Worldwide Developer’s Conference, Apple announced support for HEVC playback in HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) delivered to iOS, MacOS, and tvOS end points. For many, this announcement raised more questions than answers, which we hope to address in this article. By way of background, at Streaming Media West 2017, I co-produced a…
