Author’s Note (March 15, 2022): A colleague recently advised me that YouTube was now encoding all videos into VP9 format. A quick check revealed that he was correct; literally every video that I checked, including some uploaded back in 2010, was encoded into VP9 as well as H.264. What’s interesting is that many low-volume videos, like this one with 118 …

Contribute to the one of the most valuable sources of industry data by completing the Bitmovin Video Developer Survey.  One of the most important information sources that I’ve come to rely upon is the Bitmovin Video Developer Report (2020, 2019, 2018, 2017). I’ve covered it for Streaming Media multiple times (see here) and refer to its findings frequently in my …

Author’s note: After completing this long and arduous post, Apple sent a note that I was interpolating their scores incorrectly, leading to more analysis shown as an addendum below.  What: This article compares Apple’s AVQT metric to VMAF and SSIMWAVE’s SSIMPLUS metrics, with very limited subjective testing from Subjectify.us. The testing was extremely limited as are the conclusions you should …

The H.264 codec is still the most widely used video compression technology — aka codec in the world and likely will be for the next few years. For this reason, every streaming media professional should know what the H.264 codec is and how to encode with H.264. This beginner’s guide to encoding H.264 will describe what H.264 is, detail the …

I’m appearing on a panel next week at the SPIE Optics and Photonics Conference entitled Advanced Video Compression and Applications with a host of encoding luminaries. The panel will be streamed on August 3, 2021, at 3:30 PM PDT, but only registered guests can watch the Zoom feed (you can register here). The discussion will then be made available on YouTube …

In the first article in this series, Baby Steps with Apple’s Advanced Video Quality Tool and Quality Metric, I detailed what Apple’s Advanced Video Quality Tool (AVQT) is and how to use it. In this article, I tested multiple video files with Apple AVQT and describe my user experience. In the next article, I’ll review how AVQT scoring compares to …

This article is derived from a lesson in Streaming Media 101: Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals. If you’re looking for an efficient way to get up to speed on key streaming terms, technologies, workflows, and best practices, check out the course here.  Every time you encode a video file with a distribution-oriented codec like H.264, HEVC, VP9, or AV1, …

Maya Angelou once said that “You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been,” and so it is with per-title encoding. What began as a one-dimensional data rate adjustment that reflected the simple reality that all videos encode differently is now a complex analysis that incorporates frame rate, resolution, color gamut, and dynamic ranges, …

This article on the Wowza website provides a quick overview of the AV1 codec: what it is, how it performs, what it costs, and what it’s good for today. It’s useful if you want to get a quick feel for where AV1 fits in with other codecs. The article is the fourth in a five-part series that covers H.264, VP9, …

This video tutorial teaches you how to convert speech-to-text in Premiere Pro. I’ve been using Premiere Pro for more years than I care to think about, and most recent new features, as you’d expect with a mature product, are incremental. This new speech-to-text feature is absolutely an exponential addition that’s going to change how we think about captioning and transcribing …