My article How to Launch a Cloud Encoding Computer just posted on the Streaming Media Global site. Good thing, too, because I had just started a consulting project that required setting up and encoding on multiple AWS instances. Always handy to have a step-by-step guide, so I printed the article draft and went through it…
The video below shows two tools that I’ve installed on every computer that will run them; MediaInfo on all Windows, Linux, and Mac workstations, and Bitrate Viewer, which is Windows only. If you don’t know about these tools, you’ll find the seven-minute video very, very useful. As a preview, MediaInfo provides information about my H.264,…
I just finished my Produce Videos with FFmpeg course which I recorded with Camtasia, edited in Adobe Premiere Pro, and output in the Adobe Media Encoder (AME). I outputted from AME at about 10 Mbps to ensure quality, but now I’m left with 3 GB of files to upload. I know the data rate is…
A couple of additional data points on AV1 encoding as follow-ups to my Streaming Media article here. First, a colleague asked about 4K encoding times on Twitter. Second, a reader recommended using the row-mt switch for VP9. So, I encoded a ten-second 4K test file on the same single-CPU ZBook as the Streaming Media article.…
When I first tested AV1 encoding back in August 2018 encoding times were glacial and seriously detracted from the potential usability of the codec. Table 1 from that story tells the tale. Unless otherwise indicated, all encoding times are on my HP ZBook notebook powered by a single 2.8 GHz Intel Xeon E3-1505M v5 CPU.…
I frequently use the VMAF quality metric to analyze encoding parameters and compare codecs. In my experience, VMAF scores tend to match my own subjective quality observations and the fact that Netflix uses it gives the metric great credibility. Originally, there was only one VMAF version, but Netflix has added both a 4K model and…
I’m writing a blog post on a free Netflix utility called VMAF-Master that you can download here (Windows executable here). Basically, it’s an open-source command line utility for computing VMAF, PSNR, SSIM, and MS SSIM on Linux and Mac computers with some enterprising contributors compiling a Windows version. One very well written help file relates…
According to the last published statistics, in June 2017, Whatsapp users sent over 1 billion video messages a day. This obviously represents only a fraction of the market and daily traffic has certainly has grown since then. At the same time, 4K cameras have become standard and mobile screen resolutions have increased in size and…
I recently finished a streaming consulting project with AMC Networks and was pleased to receive the following LinkedIn recommendation from their VP of Video Products. It was great working with Greg and his team with the gorgeous content from AMC. Beyond this work with AMC, I’ve helped media companies and video publishers fine-tune their encoding…
Moscow State University’s Video Quality Measurement Tool (VQMT) has been my go-to file analysis tool dating back to 2014 (see my initial review, here, and an update, here). As you can see in this video, version 11 of the tool adds several new features, including support for the VMAF 4K model, data rate graphs, and…