Dan Rayburn recently published the video and slides from my NAB Streaming Summit session, where I walked through real-world techniques to optimize x264 and x265 for quality and efficiency. No AI, no codecs from 2030, just practical optimizations that work today. If You’re Still Encoding with x364 and x265EVC—Good You don’t need to jump to AV1 or VVC to get …

As third-party cookies fade into digital history, first-party data has risen to the top of every marketer’s wish list. Touted as the ultimate solution for targeting, personalization, and measurement in a privacy-centric era, first-party data is often positioned as the “panacea” for the challenges left in the wake of cookie deprecation. But beneath the optimism lies a hard truth: first-party …

I recently tested the Deep Render AI codec and issued a report, which you can read here. The bottom line was that in the tested low-latency use case, the Deep Render AI codec substantially outperformed SVT-AV1 quality-wise and was only slightly behind VVenC. While the codec lacks features like bitrate control that are necessary for most deployments, it offers outstanding integration …

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 …

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:​ …

I’ve been involved in a seemingly never-ending debate that started with the dubious (to me) concept of blaming Brightcove’s recent layoffs on HEVC licensing practices. The three questions involved are: Was HEVC’s licensing structure an aberration or similar to other technologies? Was HEVC a commercial success despite these licensing practices? Why didn’t non-premium content publishers adopt it? I have strong …