Learning

My article, The State of CMAF: The Holy Grail or Just Another Format?, just published on the Streaming Media website. Here’s the enticing intro: The holy grail of streaming is a single set of files that you can safely deliver to all target endpoints. The most likely candidate to help achieve this is the Common Media Application Format (CMAF). While …

The Voronoi omnidirectional video metrics have the best correlation between test scores and subjective ratings than all measured 2D and 3D metrics according to its inventors. It’s an open-source metric you can download and learn to use below. I’ll be discussing the Voronoi metric in my upcoming talk on 2D and 3D video quality metrics at Streaming Media West and …

Author’s note: When this post was written, the Zeranoe FFmpeg Windows download didn’t include VMAF, so you had to either download this version or compile your own. Now the Zeranoe version does include VMAF support; all you need to do is download the models and run the correct command strings. To learn how to do this, check out the blog …

This blog identifies six incredibly useful FFmpeg commands for transmuxing, extracting audio/video, converting to YUV/Y4M, and scaling to different resolutions. All commands are included in my book, Learn to Produce Videos with FFmpeg In 30 Minutes or Less ($34.95), and course, FFmpeg for Adaptive Bitrate Production ($29.95)  (which includes a PDF copy of the book). Don’t just learn FFmpeg; become an …

At its most basic level, streaming media is the delivery of audio and video files from a server to a client over the internet or a cellular data network. The first streaming audio was delivered in 1995, while the first streaming video followed two years later; you can read more about the early history of the technology in the first …

I’m pulling together some materials for my pre-conference session at Streaming Media West (November 18-20 in Los Angeles) entitled Objective Quality Metrics 2D & 3D: What They Are, How To Compute Them, & How To Use Them. One lesson talks about “tuning” when encoding files to be measured with metrics like PSNR, VMAF, and SSIM. It’s a crucial issue to …

According to Bitmovin’s “Video Developer Report 2019,” latency was a concern of 54% of all its survey participants. Digging into the numbers, subsequent questions revealed that almost 50% of survey participants planned to implement a low-latency technology over the next 1–2 years, with over 50% seeking latency of under 5 seconds and 30% seeking latency of under 1 second (See …

I’m pulling together some materials for my pre-conference session at Streaming Media West (November 18-20 in Los Angeles) entitled Introduction to ABR Production and Delivery. One lesson shows the technology ecosystem needed to implement OTT streaming and identifies key vendors for each function. I figured I’d throw these slides out there to get comments on the topics covered (and not …

Reviewer Ian Kennedy recently reviewed Learn to Produce Video with FFmpeg on Amazon, and he hit the nail on the head in his five-star review, saying: Who this book is for: 1) The decision maker who may be skeptical about using FFmpeg in a production environment compared to a turn-key commercial solution. 2) The video-adjacent engineer who has been asked …

So, there I was downloading videos from YouTube to include in a PowerPoint for a training course I was producing. Unfortunately, my download tool, wondershare’s excellent video converter, downloaded separate audio and video streams, the video in an MP4 wrapper and the audio as an MP3 file. So I had to mux the two to input them into PowerPoint. A …