I recently was producing some files for a client in Sorenson Squeeze, and saw some funky differences in exposure and contrast when previewing my work in QuickTime Player and other players. I produced this file at 1280×720, so feel free to zoom out to full screen to watch this video.

Two weeks ago, I was in Los Angeles at Streaming Media West. Sorenson Media was introducing a new product, Squeeze Server, and had volunteered to bring a camera and camera operator so that I could interview several Sorenson executives, and their product partners, Aspera and RightScale, for the StreamingMedia.com website. The interviews were at Squeeze Server’s launch party at the …

At StreamingMedia Europe this year I hosted a seminar on HTML5 and web standards. I was the skeptic moderator, and on my panel were four users or HTML5 related service providers. Here’s the description, and the video of the session is included below. A203: HTML5 and Web Video StandardsModerator: Jan Ozer, Principal, Doceo PublishingJan Petzold, Multimedia developer, New Media, Deutsche …

I recently taught a couple of seminars in Los Angeles at StreamingMedia West. You can find links to the presentations at the link in the previous sentance. I just got an email from a student asking: At Streaming Media West you introduced the session to MediaInfo, a very handy tool, thank you. Quick question, on one video I notice that …

HP invited a bunch of journalists, myself included, out to visit their facility in Fort Collins, CO, the headquarters for workstation design, support and marketing. Beyond the desire to meet and greet friends old and new, I had one goal – to learn what makes a computer a workstation. To explain, in the bad old days, workstations had proprietary RISC …

I just finished my H.264 vs. WebM Bakeoff presentation – you can download the PDF below. You’ve heard the hype about VP8, but how does it really compare to H.264? This session compares quality, encoding speed, and playback requirements. It also details access to VP8 encoding from within live and on-demand encoding tools, the availability of hardware playback acceleration, and …

Here’s the description of the presentation that I just gave at StreamingMedia West. You can download the PDF below. Enjoy! This seminar focuses on producing H.264 video  for streaming or progressive download. It starts with a deep look at key H.264 encoding parameters like B-frames, profiles, and levels and how to customize encoding parameters for distributing via QuickTime and Flash. …

Here at StreamingMedia West in Los Angeles this year (November, 2010) – same crowd, different location. I taught one seminar on H.264 Production for Streaming and Progressive Download, you can download the PDF here. You can find a few items of interest there; two tables showing H.264 playback statistics on Mac and Windows computers, and lots of details about streaming …

Microsoft Silverlight has been very noticably used by NBC (Olympics/Sunday Night Football), but never achieved the penetration necessary for smaller businesses to adopt it. The thing is, while the sizzle behind Silverlight has always been video (as with Flash), the steak has always been Rich Internet Applications, and more specifically, the tools that developers use to build them. In my …

Here’s a copy of the release that you can find here. HTML5 has received a tremendous amount of buzz, much of it driven by the potential for plugin-free video. However, the limited browser support for the HTML5 <video> tag has forced web designers to scramble for a solution that would work across platforms as well as browsers.  To help customers …