Apple’s HLS Authoring Specifications for Apple Devices approves up to 200% constrained VBR but Apple’s actual encodes are more like 110-120% constrained. What Apple Says As you probably know, Apple recently made sweeping changes to their HLS recommendations, including changing from 110% constrained VBR for VOD in TN2224, to 200% constrained VBR in the HLS…
As quality metrics go, PSNR is considered a blunt tool obsoleted by higher end metrics like Netflix’s VMAF or SSIMwave’s SSIMplus. That said, it’s accessible and understood, and has been used for years. Of course, none of that matters if it delivers misleading results. So that’s what I decided to test in a round of two…
I recently finished a white paper comparing the pricing for a new cloud encoding service named Hybrik with multiple cloud providers, including Amazon Elastic Transcoder, Microsoft Azure, Bitmovin, encoding.com, Telestream Cloud, and Zencoder. The white-paper was sponsored by Hybrik, and you can download it below. By way of background, I ran all calculations by the respective services…
This article is kind of a prequel to my book, Encoding by the Numbers, which I published in 2016. That is, I published this article to get commentary from folks who read it, which I factored back into my book. Unfortunately, I changed content management systems in 2018 and lost the comments. One of the…
The Netflix blog post entitled Per-Title Encode Optimization boldly declares that “to deliver the best quality video to our members, each title should receive a unique bitrate ladder, tailored to its specific complexity characteristics.”
I recently finished evaluating Beamr Video. The evaluation included analyzing the quality of the resulting clips using objective measures such as PSNR, SSIM and VQM, and conducting extensive viewing of the optimized clips, assessing their subjective quality compared to the original clips. Following this evaluation, I concluded that “for 99.99% of the expert and average…
Depending upon your encoding tool, you may have access to a checkbox or number box that controls something called IDR frames. What are these creatures and what is their significance? More importantly, what’s the optimal setting? Well, let’s just say that if you’re seeing anything like the random blockiness in the picture below when you…
