June, 2020

• 18 June

  Lesson of the Week: Producing Remote Interviews with vMix Call

  

  I recently recorded about ten interviews for a webinar produced by a client. I could have used Zoom or Skype but thought that I could achieve better quality by producing the videos with vMix Call. Briefly, vMix is a live streaming software package and Call is the feature that lets you connect with others via RTC for recording conferences. Some …

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• 16 June

  How MediaMelon SmartPlay Saves Bandwidth Costs and Improves QoE

  

  MediaMelon’s SmartPlay is a streaming optimization solution that reduces bandwidth use by 35% or more and improves QoE while working with your existing ABR content without reencoding. As you’ll read in this post, SmartPlay works by analyzing the quality of every segment in an ABR package and producing a hintfile used by the SmartPlay plug-in installed in the player to …

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• 15 June

  Preliminary VMAF and PSNR Scores for New Xilinx Transcoding Appliances

  

  Live streaming at scale is the perfect application for hardware transcoders that deliver highly-affordable encoding density. Xilinx just announced a series of transcoding appliances targeting these live streaming use cases built around the new Xilinx Real-Time (RT) Server reference architecture. I’ve been benchmarking output quality with two card-based encoders deployed in these appliances, the Alveo U30 and Alveo U50. The …

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• 12 June

  Join Me at a Webinar Discussing MediaMelon SmartPlay

  

  MediaMelon SmartPlay is a streaming optimization solution that reduces bandwidth costs by 35% or more and improves QoE while working with your existing ABR content without re-encoding. SmartPlay works with any existing encoder, including those with content-adaptive encoding (also called per-title), and most existing players and CDNs. Briefly, SmartPlay works by analyzing the quality of your live or VOD ABR …

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• 9 June

  Lesson of the Week: Finding the Just Noticeable Difference in a MOS Score

  

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May, 2020

• 31 May

  How to Install Python 3.8 and Bento 4.

  

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• 24 May

  Smart TVs with AV1 Support Now Shipping

  

  Many 2021 model Smart TVs support AV1 decoding, making it a good time to start thinking about how to encode AV1 videos. A great way to start is our course Encoding with the AV1 Codec, which details how to encode AV1 encoded video with FFmpeg (libaom-av1), the Alliance for Open Media’s standalone aomenc encoder, Intel’s SVT-AV1, and Visionular’s Aurora1.  Would …

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• 22 May

  AV1 Turns 2.0

  

  Just a quick announcement that the Alliance for Open Media has launched version 2.0 of the AOMedia AV1 encoder that you can download here. According to the Phoronix website, from which I grabbed this news: “Libaom 2.0 is the first release since the original 1.0 release back in mid-2018 after the AOMedia codec working group approved the 1.0 release. The …

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• 19 May

  Upcoming Training for Streaming Production

  

  Here are descriptions of the two courses I’ll be teaching in a few days on streaming media production.  Streaming Media East will be held online, with five 3-hour pre-conference training sessions that cost $199 each and a robust assortment of free 1-hour sessions. Here are the titles, dates, and times of the pre-conference sessions I’ll be teaching plus a short …

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• 12 May

  Third Five-Star Review for Streaming Media 101 Course

  

  I created Streaming Media 101: Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals because there were few formal training resources for those producing streaming video or the tools and services that enable streaming media production and distribution. My goal was a course that would efficiently provide streaming media training to professionals on both sides of that fence who were new to the …

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