Tag Archives: encoding review

This post provides an introduction to video codecs. It’s an entry-level article designed to help streaming newbies understand what codecs are, what they do, how to compare them, and why they succeed or fail.  Video codecs are compression technologies that reduce the bitrate of digital video to manageable sizes. Video codecs are not only central to streaming, but they’re also …

While 2018 was the year AV1 became known, 2020 will be the year that AV1 became interesting, primarily because of three developments. First, in early 2020, AV1-enabled smart TVs hit the market, right on the 2-year schedule announced back in 2018 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). Second, over the past two years, encoding times for the AOMedia AV1 …

For this review, I took a first look at encoding VVC (Ver­sa­tile Video Coding). Specifically, I compared Fraunhofer HHI’s implementation of the VVC codec (Versatile Video Encoder; VV­enC) against the Alliance for Open Media’s (AO­Media) aom­enc codec and the x.264 and x.265 codecs in FF­mpeg. I found VVenC to be simple to use and much faster than expected. Its output …

Recently I received a shortlist of compression-related questions from a consulting buddy; he’s always been gracious in answering my questions and I wanted to return the favor. Since he’s asking, I thought others might be curious as well; hence this blog post that largely incorporates my responses to his questions, all relating to encoding H.264 files. Here are the questions: …

This lesson is derived from my book, Learn to Produce Videos with FFmpeg In 30 Minutes or Less ($34.95), and my course, FFmpeg for Adaptive Bitrate Production ($29.95)  (which includes a PDF copy of the book). Don’t just learn FFmpeg; become an expert in video compression.  Overview: Setting your I-frame interval in seconds rather than frames allows you to use …

Note: This update details how to compute VMAF with FFmpeg on Windows. From my perspective, this feature has gotten progressively less usable and increasingly frustrating. Documentation is poor and the syntax is idiosyncratic and hard to use. If you have any alternative, like Moscow State University’s Video Quality Measurement Tool, I would spend the money and get something that works …