Tag Archives: Featured-Posts

I spent 30 years assessing and interpreting codec quality. Here’s the tool I built to do it. The Toolchain You’re Stuck With You know the stack. MediaInfo for file information. Bitrate Viewer for data rate profiles. MSU VQMT for metrics and frame viewing. Excel for BD-Rate and RD curves. Another spreadsheet to estimate the financial implications of your encoding decisions. …

This report illustrates and compares the royalty calculations of two patent licensing programs, Access Advance’s Video Distribution Patent (VDP) Pool and Avanci Video, using eight streaming service templates modeled after well-known platforms. The purpose is to help streaming services understand how the two programs calculate royalties and compare potential royalty costs side by side. I believe that the best way …

Deep Render entered 2024 with real technical progress on its AI-based codec. The team had a working model, encoding and decoding live in FFmpeg and VLC, published research, funding, and a belief that AI-based compression represented a step change rather than an academic experiment. What they lacked was sustained visibility with streaming professionals who make codec decisions. The gap was …

Every streaming service runs on a business model which shapes everything from content acquisition to monetization. This PDF walks through the core models every professional should know: SVOD, AVOD, TVOD, FAST, vMVPD, and Hybrid. Each slide explains how the model works and highlights a key insight into its strengths and challenges. For a deeper look at how these models combine …

I just launched Streaming Monetization 101, a 50+ lesson, roughly seven-hour course created in partnership with the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA). It’s available now through SVTA University for $399. The course provides new hires in streaming services and the companies that support them with a comprehensive, real-world understanding of how platforms generate and grow revenue. It covers the business …

AI-based video compression has been discussed in research for years, but practical implementations are virtually nonexistent. In a recent conversation with Arsalan Zafar, CTO and co-founder of Deep Render, and Sebastjan Cizel, Head of Engineering, we explored the real-world performance of Deep Render’s AI codec real-world encoding and decoding performance, how its quality compares to HEVC, AV1, and VP9, and …

I first encountered the line, “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing,” in the Robert Heinlein novel Time Enough for Love. I bring this up because this is my third recent article on GOP size, and I think I’m close to beating this topic into the ground. I’ll let you be the judge. To recount, I reported on testing in an …

I was reminded of this recently as I prepared for a talk on AV1 readiness at the upcoming United Cloud Tech Talk. Though quality is only a single factor, I wanted to nail the quality comparisons for the talk, but didn’t have time to produce all the iterations myself. It’s been a while since I benchmarked H.264, HEVC, AV1, and …

Most people reading this post want new codecs to succeed as soon as possible, and I do as well. But whenever I think about codec adoption, six pictures come to mind. Overview The first was the foundational adoption timeline released by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) with the launch of AV1 in April 2018 (see above). Essentially, this posited …

I’m updating my book, Video Encoding by the Numbers, which means lots of research into what other encoding professionals are doing. One source of knowledge I appreciate is downloading files from different websites to analyze these files. I used to use YouTube-dl, but it is not as reliable as before, and most GUI-based tools don’t work particularly well. I’m also leery about malware from some of these tools. I learned about yt-dlp this weekend and gave it a …