January, 2021

• 16 January

  Live and VOD Bootcamps at Streaming Media Connect

  

  I’m teaching two boot camps (virtually) at an upcoming Streaming Media Connect event, one for VOD and the other for live streaming; each costs $199. The courses are designed for newbies who need to get up to speed quickly on these topics. If the courses sound familiar, I taught both courses at Streaming Media West in October, though I’ve updated …

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• 16 January

  Webinar: Deploying DRM with the Wowza Streaming Engine and BuyDRM’s KeyOS Platform

  

  This webinar is designed for Wowza Streaming Engine (WSE) users who are adding digital rights management (DRM) to their live or VOD streams, particularly using BuyDRM KeyOS. It’s now available for on-demand viewing immediately below: 00:00 – Introduction 01:15 – About BuyDRM (https://buydrm.com/) 02:20 – About Derrick Freeman 03:14 – DRM Overview 03:39 – What is DRM 04:37 – How …

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• 16 January

  Dolby Finds That Streaming 101 Course “Enhanced Overall Productivity”

  

  When I launched my online course, Streaming Media 101: Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals, one of the first companies that signed on for multiple students was Dolby Laboratories, Inc. Several students came from the Enterprise Encoding division, which is headed by Senior Director David Trescot. This is the group that created the Hybrik encoding platform acquired by Dolby in …

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• 10 January

  Lesson of the Week: The New Rules of Codec Deployments

  

  Adoption of MPEG-2, H.264, and HEVC was almost automatic in some markets because implementors assumed that royalties would be reasonable and that the codecs would succeed. Two factors have changed those assumptions; the HEVC royalty mess and the formation of the Alliance for Open Media. This short video details how these two factors have changed how codecs are deployed. If …

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• 10 January

  Train Your Streaming Media Professionals: Your Place or Mine?

  

  COVID-related travel and meeting restrictions don’t obviate the need for employee training. This article documents the four training options available for streaming media professionals from the Streaming Learning Center.  I created the Streaming Learning Center to help train streaming media professionals, particularly those involved in encoding, packaging, and delivering streaming video. Initially, we offered books and live training, and then …

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• 4 January

  Google Adding HEVC Playback to Chrome? Seems like a Longshot

  

  I recently received the following message from a colleague, a respected IP attorney, on LinkedIn. Hi Jan, hope all’s well. What do you make of Google joining HEVC Advance’s pool (now Access Advance)? Talking to some relevant players, I think it’s a prelude to Chrome supporting HEVC. Do you think it has any implications for AV2 or VVC? Thanks, and …

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December, 2020

• 28 December

  AV1 Encoding with aomenc.exe, libaom-AV1, SVT-AV1, and Aurora1

  

  While 2018 was the year AV1 became known, 2020 will be the year that AV1 became interesting, primarily because of three developments. First, in early 2020, AV1-enabled smart TVs hit the market, right on the 2-year schedule announced back in 2018 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). Second, over the past two years, encoding times for the AOMedia AV1 …

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• 22 December

  Encoding VVC with Fraunhofer’s VVenC

  

  For this review, I took a first look at encoding VVC (Ver­sa­tile Video Coding). Specifically, I compared Fraunhofer HHI’s implementation of the VVC codec (Versatile Video Encoder; VV­enC) against the Alliance for Open Media’s (AO­Media) aom­enc codec and the x.264 and x.265 codecs in FF­mpeg. I found VVenC to be simple to use and much faster than expected. Its output …

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• 16 December

  Lesson of the Week: Displaying PowerPoint Slide Shows in a Window

  

  Displaying PowerPoint slide shows in a window comes in handy for presenting in webinars and for screencam capture.  Like most of us out there, I’ve been using PowerPoint for about six thousand years. One feature I just learned, displaying slide shows in a window, comes in handy for two common use cases for me, presenting at webinars and recording 1920×1080 …

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• 4 December

  Five Star Review for AV1 Encoding Course

  

  Just a quick note to celebrate the first review of my Encoding with the AV1 Codec course ($99.95). By way of background, I designed the course to help familiarize students with the confusing array of AV1 encoding parameters and to offer sample command strings that I have proven over weeks of testing. In other words, to save time, which is …

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