If you’re optimizing x265 for speed, enabling Wavefront Parallel Processing (WPP) looks like a no-brainer. Table 1 shows a staggering 7.3x improvement in encoding time. A 3:15 encode with WPP turns into a painful 23:51 without it. The quality penalty? Negligible. VMAF drops just 0.19, with the low-frame VMAF off by only 0.77  (low-frame is the lowest VMAF score of …

Background Authors & Affiliations: Zhaoyang Jia and Linfeng Qi (USTC), Bin Li, Jiahao Li, Wenxuan Xie, Houqiang Li, and Yan Lu (Microsoft Research Asia). This project stems from an open-source effort initiated in late 2023, with code available on GitHub. The paper targets a long-standing obstacle for neural video codecs (NVCs): achieving real-time performance without sacrificing compression quality. Existing approaches …

Google just kicked the can down the road—again—on killing third-party cookies in Chrome. While much of the advertising world rejoiced at the announcement, privacy professionals and legal teams should be sweating. This isn’t a free pass. It’s a stay of execution. Specifically, in a statement released on April 22, 2025, Anthony Chavez, Vice President of the Privacy Sandbox initiative, stated:​ …