Tag Archives: Featured-Posts

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 …

Creating batch files with variables is one of the more efficient ways to run FFmpeg. However, most producers build their batch files with variables inserted directly into the batch file, which means that you have to customize each batch file for different source files or encoding parameters. This is particularly inefficient when you’re encoding multiple files to different encoding parameters; …

I’m thrilled to introduce my newest course on LCEVC video enhancement! It’s designed to introduce newbies to LCEVC, explain why it’s important, identify the tools available for enhancing and decoding, and teach you how to get the most out of encoding videos with LCEVC enhancement. Here’s what you’ll learn: Lesson 1: LCEVC Fundamentals – Learn the basics and importance of …

This post focuses on AI in preprocessing and encoding products. I’ll examine two aspects: how to consider AI in encoding performance and how to consider AI in the user interface and operation. I’ll conclude by discussing where I see AI going in codec development over the next few years. For perspective, I recently spoke with more than twenty companies for …

I’ve just posted a major codec update to my course, Streaming Media 101: Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals. The update incorporates the latest on H.264, HEVC, VP9, AV1, LCEVC, and VVC, with EVC excluded since it’s made such little progress on productization and royalty status to date (though the MPAI is doing some interesting things). The update totals about …

This article discusses five common errors that can be obscured by automated video quality assessment scripts and how to avoid them.  Most video producers use some measure of automated testing in their codec or encoder comparisons or during normal production. While automated testing is essential, it’s easy to make the five following errors if you don’t spot-check your results. The …

Here are the free “must-have” apps I install on every Windows computer (and three for-fee tools for deeper analysis).  I just received a new Dell Precision 7820 server and had to prepare it for video transcoding and analysis. Here are the tools I installed to get up and running. I present the list and links first and then a list …

I was raised in a beachfront commuter town about 60 miles south of Manhattan and five miles north of Springsteen’s Asbury Park. I went to Seashore Day Camp years 8-13, swimming laps in the pool each morning and clowning around in the ocean each afternoon. I spent middle school and high school in the Atlantic as often as possible, swimming, …