March, 2013

• 26 March

  Review: Teradek VidiU, a First Look at the Compact H.264 Encoder

  Small and affordable, the VidiU lets broadcasters stream HD from anywhere. But, one flaw keeps us from calling it a must-buy

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• 5 March

  From Russia With Love

  In March, I visited Moscow to speak at the Connected TV Forum. The trip was sponsored by NGENIX, the leading regional CDN in Russia and CIS, and their CEO, Konstantin Chumachenko, was the first to reach out. My talk, Producing for Multiple Screen Delivery (and you can download the handouts here), was formulated with the help of Konstantin and conference …

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February, 2013

• 14 February

  What Is HEVC (H.265)?

  H.265/High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the successor codec to H.264, which, like H.264, is jointly developed by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group and ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG). The primary goal of the new codec is 50 percen

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• 8 February

  Portland Community College’s Multimedia Program Switches to Adobe Creative Suite

  There’s been a lot of back and forth about how Final Cut Pro X (FCPX) has been accepted in the marketplace. Before its introduction, though Adobe had been making headway against Final Cut Pro 7 (FCP7), it’s fair to say that FCP7 had greater mindshare in the educational and professional educational community. My own informal discussions with many educators and …

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• 7 February

  Is it just me, or is there nothing more stupid in the world than Linked-in Endorsements?

  Is it just me, or is there nothing more stupid in the world than Linked-in Endorsements? I got another this morning, from one of the hundreds of LinkIn connections who I only tangentially know, and who I have never produced work for in the field that he endorsed me in. Hootie-Hoo, those consulting dollars are going to fly in now. …

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January, 2013

• 7 January

  HTML5-Compatible Market Share Tops 68%

  HTML5 video is all the rage, but if your viewer's browser isn't HTML5-compatible, the video won't play unless you fallback to Flash or similar technology. I'm working on a new book and wanted to determine the percentage of desktop browsers that are H

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December, 2012

• 29 December

  How streaming is more efficient than progressive download

  I created this short video to illustrate how streaming is more efficient than delivering via progressive download. For illustrating the efficiencies of streaming, I used a file streamed via RTMP, but you can get the same benefit via chunk-based HTTP based technologies like HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), Smooth Streaming, HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS), or DASH, when it becomes available. I …

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• 22 December

  WebM: It’s Forgotten but Not Quite Gone

  I recently taught several seminars on producing video for HTML5, and I started my preparation with some research to see how the WebM codec was being used to determine the focus and scope of my WebM-related materials. In case you’ve forgotten &m

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• 22 December

  News Flash for Compressionists: Garbage in Means Garbage Out

  First, video compression is a garbage in/garbage out medium, so output quality improves with input quality. Second, codecs such as H.264 are lossy, which means the lower the data rate, the lower the quality. Finally, intermediate formats such as ProR

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• 22 December

  Encoding for Multiple Devices

  Many streaming producers are increasing the number of mobile and over-the-top (OTT) platforms that they support while implementing adaptive streaming to enhance the viewing experience on each. There are two ways to accomplish this: produce a unique s

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