January, 2018

• 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

• 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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• 21 December

  Live From Streaming Media East

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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

• 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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• 27 November

  HEVC IP Owners Are Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

  

  Just back from ten days in Europe where I spoke at Streaming Tech Sweden and met with many streaming producers and encoding vendors. In particular, the vendors expressed dismay at the slow adoption of HEVC, particularly in view of Apple’s decision to include HEVC in HLS. Now that we’ve confirmed that battery life won’t be an issue, adding HEVC to HLS seems like …

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• 21 November

  Download Handout and View Streaming Tech Sweden Keynote

  

  I’m so excited to be at Stockholm speaking at Streaming Tech Sweden. My keynote address is entitled Codecs in 2018 and Beyond, and I discuss the future of H.264, HEVC, VP9, AV1, PERSEUS and Divideon xvc. The event producer, Eyevinn Technologies, has graciously approved my publishing the handout, which you can download below. Here’s the video on YouTube. Streaming Tech Sweden_Ozer_final

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• 10 November

  Download Handouts and Watch Videos from Streaming Media West

  

  Just back from Streaming Media West in Huntington Beach, where I participated in seven presentations over three days. Handouts are up and ready for your download, and the videos are up as well. Three of these presentations, on FFmpeg, HEVC/HLS, and latency, were co-produced by David Hassoun and Jun Heider from the RealEyes consultancy, which serves clients like NBC, ESPN, MLBAM, Adobe, and …

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• 8 November

  AV1 No Shows At Streaming Media West; Better in Stockholm?

  

  I’ve been bullish on AV1 since the start, but I’m starting to think the codec is both farther away and less useful than I initially thought. Here’s what’s happening. For Streaming Media East in June 2017, an AV1 member encoded four videos, totaling about 8.5 minutes, to five data rates each for 720p, 1080p, and 4K, and the output quality …

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