March, 2014

• 18 March

  YouTube Deploying DASH-Variant to Reduce Mobile Latency

  Read an interesting article in CoreAnalysis, a Canadian blog run by Patrick Lopez, who reports that YouTube has been experimenting with multiple technologies to reduce mobile wait time, and is now deploying a DASH-based technology they call Sliced Bread. Here’s the technology description. YouTube Sliced Bread essentially compares the DASH ABR manifest with the speed and bandwidth that is available …

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• 18 March

  Tutorial: Encoding for Streaming from a Website

  This is one of 42 lessons from my course Video Compression for Web, Disc and PC/TV/Console Playback, on Udemy (bit.ly/Ozer_u). It’s one of the most important lessons, covering bits/pixel, which is a critical concept in streaming. As an informational lesson, this is mostly PowerPoint with audio. Most other lessons include screencam demos of the software or Internet functions being demonstrated.  …

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• 17 March

  Positive Reviews of Udemy Video Compression Course

  The first reviews of my new video compression course on Udemy are in, and they’re quite positive (of course, otherwise I wouldn’t be blogging about them).  Travis Roesler, owner of howtofightnow.com, a website that offers self defense courses, rated my Udemy course five stars, and commented: Jan REALLY helped me out. I can’t even begin to tell you how much …

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• 16 March

  A Buyer’s Guide to Live Encoders

  All live events start with an encoded stream produced by a live streaming encoder. In this guide, I’ll discuss the categories of live encoding products and identify the factors you should consider when buying an encoder.

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• 16 March

  Webinar: Encoding for iBooks Author

  Note: With the June 2014 release of iBooks Author, the procedures discussed here no longer work. Good luck with your iBooks Author encodes. Adding video to an iBook is simple; just drag the clip into your book in iBooks Author. But if iBooks Author “optimizes” the video you inserted, it’s encoding it again and potentially boosting the data rate far …

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• 15 March

  A Buyer’s Guide to Cloud Encoders

  There are many instances where cloud encoding is both efficient and cost-effective. For example, if you’re working with files already saved to the cloud -- perhaps for archival purposes, perhaps because you’re distributing content contrib

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• 14 March

  How to Choose and Implement a Webcasting Solution

  So you want to produce a webcast, perhaps for training, marketing, or sales. You envision a presentation involving a talking head video and PowerPoint, and maybe some extras such as chat and Q&A. Price is definitely a consideration, but you also

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• 13 March

  How to Make the Move to HEVC

  While few companies of any kind are actually making money from HEVC (H.265) today, the successor to H.264 will become increasingly important during the next 2–3 years, perhaps even earlier in some markets for some producers. So understanding th

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• 8 March

  A Buyer’s Guide to Live Streaming Services

  So, you’ve decided to stream a live event, and you’re considering your options. You definitely need a streaming server to reach your target viewers. You could buy and install your own server (or rent a cloud instance), but then you’

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• 7 March

  How to Encode Video for HLS Delivery

  HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) is a simple and elegant architecture created by Apple for delivering adaptive bit rate streams to iOS devices and compatible browsers, essentially Safari. Since its release, HLS has been incorporated into technologies that e

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