On September 11, 2019, Streaming Media Magazine published an article entitled Hardware-Based Transcoding Solutions Roundup: Testing Performance, that compared various H.264 and HEVC encoders using objective and subjective testing. The HEVC encoders tested included Intel’s SVT (Scalable Video Technology)-HEVC, a software-based codec; NGCodec’s FPGA-based HEVC encoder (now owned by Xilinx) and x265 using the medium and veryfast presets. After the …

Recently, video quality metrics have gotten a lot of hate, primarily from codec vendors. For example, yesterday on LinkedIn, respected Beamr CTO Dror Gill wrote, “everyone agrees that subjective (human) testing is the only accurate way to measure true perceptual quality.” After I pointed out industry support for using video quality metrics, Gill graciously changed this to “everyone agrees that …

I know Thanksgiving was a couple of weeks ago, but as we close out the year, I want to say thank you to the three suppliers of codec-related usage data—Bitmovin, Encoding.com, and LiveU—and summarize the data they supplied us in 2019. This will put the stamp on what we know this year and set the stage for 2020. I’ll discuss …