Streaming Media recently published my article on VVC and AV1, Software Decoding and the Future of Mobile Video. An honest evaluation of the article might observe that while the quality comparisons between SVT-AV1 and VVenC were relatively complete, the article didn’t share any mobile playback performance data. That’s because I couldn’t find any VVC players for testing on either mobile platform.  …

Recently, I reviewed the Deep Render AI codec and noticed a substantial disconnect between subjective and objective results. Subjective testing showed Deep Render with a 45 percent BD-Rate advantage over SVT-AV1. VMAF showed just 3 percent. While subjective evaluation has always been the gold standard, this gap forced a more basic question: how accurate are traditional objective metrics when applied …

While many AI-based codecs are still making their first appearance in white papers, often with tortured playback requirements and no working decoder, the Deep Render codec is already encoding in FFmpeg, playing in VLC, and running on the billions of NPU-enabled devices already in the market. Let’s take a step back. I’ve been following the development of the Deep Render …