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6 October
Here’s What I’m Teaching at Streaming Media West Next Month

Streaming Media West is coming up next month in the City of Los Angeles (as opposed to Huntington Beach where it’s been the last few years). Specifically, it’s at the Westin Bonaventure on November 19-20 (Tuesday/Wednesday) with pre-conference sessions on Monday the 18th. I’ll be my normal busy self with two pre-conference sessions and several presentations. Here are the dates, …
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4 October
Creating a Unique Encoding Ladder for Smartphone Viewers

Many producers distribute the same encoding ladder to all viewers. However, sending a 1080p stream to smartphone viewers may be a waste of bandwidth as both SSIMPLUS and VMAF scores reveal that lower resolution, lower-bandwidth videos deliver similar quality at a lower cost. This tutorial, from my course Computing and Using Video Quality Metrics, shows you the tests I performed …
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4 October
MPEG LA DASH Pool Stops Offering New Licences

On August 12, 2019, I reported in Streaming Media Magazine that the hugely unpopular MPEG LA DASH Pool might be shutting down. I shared what was purported to be a draft letter from MPEG LA President Larry Horn to pool members which stated the following: “Regrettably, with more than one year’s experience marketing the DASH License according to its revised …
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18 September
SLC Launches New Course on Video Quality Metrics

Announcing a new online course entitled, Computing and Using Video Quality Metrics: A Course for Encoding Professionals. The course contains over four hours of video instruction and costs $99.95. The course teaches you how to choose, compute, and interpret video quality metrics like VMAF, SSIMPLUS, PSNR, and SSIM. Here are some of the key items you will learn. The pros and …
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12 August
New Five-Star Review for FFmpeg Book

Derrick Freeman is a luminary in the Streaming Video world, an expert on Wowza Streaming Engine and Telestream Wirecast (among other products) who has consulted with and instructed dozens of companies, universities, and other organizations. When Derrick needed to learn how to use FFmpeg, he purchased a copy of my book, Learn to Produce Video with FFmpeg in 30 Minutes …
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24 June
MSU VQMT Gets Auto-Scaling But Watch the Scaling Algorithm

One of the first operations I learned in FFmpeg was how to scale subsampled video files back to the source resolution to compute PSNR in the Moscow State University (MSU) Video Quality Measurement Tool (VQMT). Thankfully, for those not familiar with FFmpeg, as of VQMT version 11.1, this operation is no longer necessary. Yup, VQMT can now autoscale your lower-resolution …
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14 June
Hey AOM: Where’s the Beef?

I just saw Vimeo’s “isn’t it wonderful that we’re publishing video with AV1” announcement and felt the need to call BS. First, it’s time to stop calling AV1 royalty-free and promoting the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) as some kind of noble effort to keep video on the web free. Second, don’t tell me that you’re using AV1 to “embrace …
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12 June
FFmpeg Threads Command: How it Affects Quality and Performance

This article details how the FFmpeg threads command impacts performance, overall quality, and transient quality for live and VOD encoding. The level of testing and analysis detailed here is consistent with the instruction in my book, Learn to Produce Videos with FFmpeg In 30 Minutes or Less ($34.95), and my course, FFmpeg for Adaptive Bitrate Production ($29.95) (which includes a …
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30 May
Baby Steps in Producing an HLS Master Manifest With FFmpeg

This article has been superseded by this article entitled, An FFmpeg Script to Render and Package a Complete HLS Presentation. So there I was, teaching a class at Streaming Media East entitled How To Build A Free Encoder/Packager With Watch Folder Operation Using Open Source Tools (handout and video available here). An attendee asked about creating an HLS manifest with …
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27 May
The Evolving Encoding Ladder: What You Need to Know

This article discusses the evolution of the encoding ladder from the fixed ladder presented by Apple in Tech Note TN2224 to context-aware-encoding, which creates a ladder that not only considers the encoding complexity of the content, but also the producer’s QoE and QoS metrics. The encoding ladder embodies the most significant encoding decisions made by encoding professionals, and understanding this …
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