I’m starting to get excited about the free Defining Your Encoding Ladder webinar today at 2:00 PM EST. In addition to a focus on reducing encoding and distribution costs (cut layers, cut ladders, cut bandwidth), I’ll be exploring three options for including HEVC in HLS presentations, and will be showing preliminary encoding ladders from MainConcept (hybrid HEVC/H.264), Bitmovin (HEVC only), …

Your encoding ladder controls the visual quality of all video that you deliver, but there are few absolutes. Ask five experts to design the optimal encoding ladder, and you’d get five different answers. That said, there are some tools and concepts you can use to identify where you may need to tweak our ladder, all providing a different lens to …

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 tests. This is the first, …