On August 13, 2026, the 7th Civil Chamber of the Munich I Regional Court issued a 67-page FRAND Guidelines. Although multiple outlets have reported on them, I have not located a public copy of the Guidelines themselves, though I have requested one. In the Guidelines, the court estimated an top-down monthly per-subscriber royalty of €0.63 for a standard Netflix subscription and …
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Executive Summary The H.264 codec has proven remarkably durable, but demand for 4K efficiency, HDR compatibility, and small-screen/low-bitrate quality makes adopting advanced codecs like VP9, HEVC, AV1, and VVC inevitable for most services. However, between 2022 and 2026, the economics of streaming codecs have changed materially. Tier‑1 OTT services that once paid $100K in H.264 content royalties may now pay …
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Here’s the question on the table. x264’s veryslow preset delivers better quality than the medium preset but takes roughly 4x longer to encode, boosting your encoding costs by a healthy 4x (2-3x if using a cloud encoder). Which is the right preset for you, medium or veryslow? Like everything else in streaming, it depends. By way of background, in a …
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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. …
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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 …
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