Tag Archives: Encoding your video

June 23, 2010 – Just back from a day and 1/2 of streaming related training at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. The Agency was transitioning from a Real Networks-based system over to Flash, and wanted a general introduction to Flash and current practices of streaming producers. Here’s the agenda, and you can download a detailed outline of …

In case you missed it (har, har), Apple shipped the iPad in early April. I think one of the best uses of the new device will be for video playback and photo display. In this column, I’ll discuss how to encode video for the iPad. What’s that you ask? Do I have one? Well, sure, certainly. What do I think? …

Download the PDF handout for the H.264 Production seminar that I taught at StreamingMedia East. Here’s the agenda. Some fun slides on encoding for the iPad, which is surprisingly complex when you figure the available delivery techniques.

Much of the early buzz about the iPad centered around DVD or higher quality video, and certainly with the ability to play 720p video, the iPad can handle lots of high bandwidth, high quality streams. But what about if you’re encoding video to send via Wi-Fi, or cellular once the 3G version is released?  Well, there’s an app for that. …

One of the tricks to speedy encoding with Sorenson Squeeze is to open multiple instances of the program and encode in parallel, which you could do on the Mac and in Windows through version 5.x. When I tested this with version 6, however, it no longer worked on the Mac. For this reason, when I reviewed Sorenson Squeeze for my …

I’ve been tracking Scalable Video Coding (SVC) for the last year or so and there’s been little tangible evidence of adoption. Recently Toronto-based Seawell Networks came out of stealth mode, but only barely, announcing that they are in the H.264 marketplace, but providing no product details. I met company CEO Brian Collie at a trade show last November, but he …

Xiph, Ogg and Crossing the Chasm When comparing Ogg Theora to H.264, most reviewers have focused solely on video quality. But that’s only a small component of what it will take for Ogg to achieve mainstream success. I just finished my first foray into encoding Ogg Theora and I have to say that I was impressed by the technology; especially …

Late last week, Google closed the On2 acquisition that they started in 2009, and now owns the VP4 – VP8 video codecs. At the time, there was much debate about Google’s intent, now most analysts assume that Google bought On2 to open source the codec and let it serve as the basis for the video tag in HTML5. For a …

Summary: This article is presented in reverse order, newest on top, oldest on the bottom. I’ve briefly summarized the goal and procedure, but you can read from the bottom up to get the background. Briefly, the goal of the exercise was to compare the quality of Ogg Theora with H.264 using two test files — one SD, the other HD …

Got a question from an acquaintance on the best strategy for uploading files to YouTube, and I thought it might have broader interest, so here’s the Q & A. Question: I was wondering, since YouTube doesn’t appear to be using B-Frames in its encoding, is there any reason to send files to YouTube that have been encoded with B-Frames?  Ie …