I’m releasing the 2018 update to my book Learn to Produce Video with FFmpeg in 30 Minutes or Less, and you can download a chapter for free below. It’s Chapter 4 on bitrate control techniques which includes constant bitrate encoding (CBR), variable bitrate encoding (VBR), Constant Rate Factor (CRF), and Capped CRF. As with all chapters,…
This is the third in a five-part series on how to cut your encoding and streaming costs. The first article was on Adjusting Encoding Configurations to Increase Capacity, while the second was on Deploying Capped CRF Encoded videos. You can dramatically reduce net encoding and storage costs by implementing dynamic packaging for your live or VOD…
This is the second in a five-part series on how to cut your encoding and streaming costs. The first article was Saving on Encoding: Adjust Encoding Configuration to Increase Capacity. Article summary: Capped CRF encoding is a single-pass encoding method that can save encoding costs compared to two-pass VBR. Capped CRF is also a simple per-title…
This is the first of five articles on how to cut your encoding and streaming costs. A key focus of my book Video Encoding by the Numbers was to isolate the qualitative impact of critical encoding decisions, particularly when they significantly impact encoding time. For example, if a configuration improves quality by 1%, it likely…
Sorenson Squeeze was one of the first encoding tools that many streaming professionals used and now it’s officially end-of-lifed as you can see from the featured image atop this page (from here). It’s not really a surprise; in 2015, I interviewed new Sorenson CEO Marcus Liassides who described how Sorenson would be focusing on building tools…
As corporations move their compute resources into public and private clouds, and other virtual environments, most encoding vendors are doing the same with their encoders, though not all markets are moving at the same speed. In my Streaming Media article, A Hybrid Approach Guides the Changing Face of On-Prem Encoding, I spoke with about 13 vendors,…
If you’ve been following my work, you know that I’m very bullish on per-title encoding and optimization technologies, and have reviewed them several times. One technology that I haven’t tested before is from Crunch Media Works, which offers video optimization tools that can be used on public and private computer servers, as well as mobile…
For all talk about the new AV1 codec or HEVC in HLS, the simplest and fastest way to save bandwidth costs and improve your viewer’s QoE is to deploy video optimization or per-title encoding. I explore why in a column now up on StreamingMedia.com. You can implement a simple form of per-title encoding with FFmpeg…
At NAB 2018 I gave a talk on applying quality metrics to 2D and VR video, and the video has just become available. So here’s the session description, and the video and a link to the handout is below. Choosing the number of streams in an adaptive group and configuring them is usually a subjective,…
Figure 1. BD-rate savings from AV1 as published by Facebook. When Facebook compared the AV1 codec to VP9 and two flavors of H264, their researcher precisely stated, “In terms of PSNR, the average BD-rate savings of AV1 relative to x264 main, x264 high and libvpx-vp9 were 51.0%, 47.0% and 29.9%, respectively.” This means that AV1…
