July, 2018

• 25 July

  Sorenson Squeeze RIP

  

  Sorenson Squeeze was one of the first encoding tools that many streaming professionals used and now it’s officially end-of-lifed as you can see from the featured image atop this page (from here). It’s not really a surprise; in 2015, I interviewed new Sorenson CEO Marcus Liassides who described how Sorenson would be focusing on building tools to drive the future of …

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• 24 July

  Choosing a Cloud or On-Premise Encoder

  

  As corporations move their compute resources into public and private clouds, and other virtual environments, most encoding vendors are doing the same with their encoders, though not all markets are moving at the same speed. In my Streaming Media article, A Hybrid Approach Guides the Changing Face of On-Prem Encoding, I spoke with about 13 vendors, including Harmonic, Telestream, encoding.com, Comprimato, …

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• 24 July

  Codec Overview on Streaming Media Website

  

  AV1 has been all consuming from a mindshare perspective for many streaming professionals, but the fact of the matter is that unless you’re distributing stream quantities on par with Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, and Hulu, AV1 won’t be relevant for at least two years, maybe longer. I discuss why in my Streaming Media article, Return of the Codec Wars: A New Hope—a …

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• 23 July

  Crunch Technology Shines in Per-Title Comparison

  

  If you’ve been following my work, you know that I’m very bullish on per-title encoding and optimization technologies, and have reviewed them several times. One technology that I haven’t tested before is from Crunch Media Works, which offers video optimization tools that can be used on public and private computer servers, as well as mobile devices, to reduce the bandwidth …

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• 22 July

  Premiere Pro Won’t Load AVCHD Audio? FFmpeg to the Rescue

  

  If you’re trying to load AVCHD files into Premiere Pro and you’re on Windows 7 or earlier, the AVCHD video will likely load without the audio file. That’s because instead of supporting Dolby decoding natively in Premiere Pro, like they used to, Adobe now piggybacks off the operating support in Windows 8 and beyond. Since Windows 7 doesn’t support Dolby …

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• 19 July

  Finding the Equivalent x264 Commands for FFmpeg

  

  Most of the x264 commands that I use in FFmeg are simple and well documented. Today, I had to duplicate a Handbrake preset that included some obscure x264-specific configuration options like the following: cabac=0:aq-mode=3:slices=24:direct=auto:subme=8:trellis=1:deblock=-2,-1:me=umh Cabac, I got, but most of the rest I use the default setting for the selected preset. Since Handbrake was displaying x264 commands which are different …

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• 16 July

  HEVC Adoption Slow But Steady Says Beamr Report

  

  A recent report published by Unisphere Research and Streaming Media magazine, and sponsored by Beamr, reveals some interesting data on HEVC adoption. Entitled Real-World HEVC Insights: Adoption, Implications, and Workflows, the report is available for free download on StreamingMedia.com (registration required) and is authored by my colleague Tim Siglin, a Streaming Media contributing editor and founding executive director of the …

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• 13 July

  The HEVC IP Mess is Worse than you Think

  

  A recent article in IPWatchdog analyzed HEVC-related patent ownership and found that “only one-third of relevant patents have been declared in patent pools.” So, even companies that license from all three pools are at substantial risk of challenges from other IP owners. With a new standard coming, MPEG needs to update its licensing policies, not its technology. The article was …

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• 5 July

  Mapping SSIM and VMAF Scores to Subjective Ratings

  

  One visual quality metric that’s getting a bit more love lately is the Structured Similarity Index (SSIM). For example, when Facebook launched their first VR Metric, SSIM360, they based it on SSIM. I’ve generally avoided using SSIM because the scoring range is too small for my liking (0 – 1) and I wasn’t aware of any way to map SSIM scores …

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• 2 July

  Learn to Produce Video with FFmpeg in 30 Minutes or Less: 2018 Edition

  

  The internet is full of free FFmpeg documentation. Why should you pay $34.95 for my book (or $29.95 for the PDF)? Because it will help you get your work done fast and get it right the first time. This book eliminates the time you’d spend hunting for answers on Superuser or Stack Overflow and teaches you to make informed encoding decisions …

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