Tag Archives: Featured-Posts

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 …

Learn to use Capped CRF with SVT-AV1 and FFmpeg for live transcoding, including how capped CRF compares to VBR and CBR. All tests and results are available in downloadable PDF. Capped CRF is an alternative to VBR and CBR that saves bandwidth on easy-to-encode sequences and preserves quality on hard-to-encode sequences. Our tests with SVT-AV1 and FFmpeg show: Performance: Capped …

There are four bitrate control techniques worth considering for live encoding/transcoding using the SVT-AV1 codec. These are: Capped CRF VBR Capped VBR Constrained VBR Here’s what I found: Overall: Capped CRF shows promise with significant bitrate savings, good quality retention, and the best overall performance by ~10 – 25% (meaning more streams from the same hardware). VBR was generally the …

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, …

This article provides a quick reference for video codec details from H.264 to LCEVC, excluding EVC, because so little progress has been made on productization. Codec Overview Starting at the top, the year released emphasizes how long H.264 has remained the dominant codec, as evidenced by ReThink’s 2023 usage rate of about 72%. Browser penetration, as measured by CanIuse, is …

Just a quick announcement to let you know that if you’re taking a course on the Streaming Learning Center, you can now access lessons via a mobile app. By way of background,  we use a learning management system called Thinkific to host all Streaming Learning Center courses. Thinkific recently launched its new mobile app for iOS and Android that we …

Codecs are tools we use to reach our viewers. So, when it comes to codecs, the best ability is play-ability, or the ability to play on the target platforms our viewers prefer to watch. For years, H.264 has remained dominant simply because it played everywhere; but as videos grow larger, faster, and deeper in color, the cost of distributing H.264 …

This is the first in a series of posts detailing what you need to know to create the perfect encoding ladder. It’s a high-level introductory series good for streaming novices, but too basic for most experienced streaming producers. This article details how to choose the best codec for streaming video.  What’s a codec? A compression technology that shrinks your video …

I’m pleased to report another five-star review for the streaming production course Streaming Media 101: Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals. So far, the course has been taken hundreds of times with eleven reviews, all five stars. Here’s what the latest review, from Lasse Bronsholt, had to say. The Streaming Media 101 course was a very good experience for me …

To a great degree, video codec adoption is driven by the simple break-even formula presented above. You put your costs on top, your savings per hour on the bottom, and come up with the number of hours of video you have to distribute to recoup your costs and start hitting the plus column. If you’re in a TL/DR frame of …