Streaming Learning Center Where Streaming Professionals Learn to Excel
It took awhile, but the first review of my book, Learn to Produce Videos with FFmpeg: In Thirty Minutes or Less, is up on Amazon. Here’s the key comment. “Everything here is already available on the net. But this is much easier. Worth the price just to have it all in one place. Easy to read and understand. Does not go …
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January, 2018
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23 January
New Report Details Impact of Apple’s Inclusion of HEVC in HLS
Interested in how Apple’s adding HEVC to HLS is impacting streaming producer’s intent to start encoding with HEVC? How about their attitudes towards the Alliance for Open Media’s AV1 codec? A new report available on the Streaming Media website covers both of these issues and more. Entitled, The Impact of Apple’s HEVC Adoption: A Survey-Based Report, the report asks how quickly the …
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22 January
In Case You Haven’t Heard: Apple Joins Alliance for Open Media
The skinny: Apple, a member of the MPEG LA H.264 and HEVC patent pools, and staunch supporter of standards (and avoider of open source-codecs) broke ranks and joined the Alliance for Open Media. Give me more: Apple has always deployed standards-based codecs, and Steve Jobs was very negative on Google’s VP8 open-source codec when launched. Alliance for Open Media (AOM) …
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18 January
Check Your Dang Log Files
One of the more intriguing streaming-related numbers out there is the Netflix ISP Speed Index which topped out at a paltry 3.98 Mbps in the US during December 2017 (Figure 1). According to Netflix, “The Netflix ISP Speed Index lists the average prime-time bitrate for Netflix content streamed to Netflix members during a particular month. For ‘Prime Time’, we calculate the …
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15 January
Apple Joins Alliance for Open Media: What Does it Mean?
On January 5, roughly 27 months after the inception of the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), Apple appeared on the organization’s website as a “founding member.” Like everyone else, we first read the story on CNET, and CNET likely found out when the Alliance simply updated its website. As you probably know, AOM was formed in September 2015, during the height of …
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15 January
HEVC in HLS: 10 Key Questions for Streaming Video Developers
At its June 2017 Worldwide Developer’s Conference, Apple announced support for HEVC playback in HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) delivered to iOS, MacOS, and tvOS end points. For many, this announcement raised more questions than answers, which we hope to address in this article. By way of background, at Streaming Media West 2017, I co-produced a preconference session on encoding HEVC …
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December, 2017
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23 December
Divideon Creates xvc, an HEVC Codec With Reasonable Pricing
It’s easy to imagine the deployment of HEVC as a case study in business and technology schools about how not to launch a technology. Not only do you have a launch cycle that clearly limited adaption, you also have classic illustrations of two of the major problems related to standard-essential patents, patent holdup, and royalty stacking. Patent holdup refers to the practice …
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16 December
How to Choose and Use Objective Video Quality Benchmarks
Whether you know it or not, many of the videos that you watch have been configured using video quality metrics. Oh, you disagree? Well, have you have watched Netflix recently? Over the last 2 years or so, Netflix’s encoding ladders have been driven by the company’s Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion (VMAF) metric and, before that, Peak Signal to Noise Ratio …
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November, 2017
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30 November
Netflix on AV1
A short one. Before my trip to Stockholm last week, I sent a list of questions regarding AV1 to David Ronca, Director of Encoding Technologies at Netflix. As a company, Netflix has been very open and gracious about sharing their opinions and test results, both in their excellent blog posts and in many articles in many publications. Netflix’s scale and encoding …
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