Tag Archives: Featured-Posts

In a recent conversation with Jan Ozer from the Streaming Learning Center, Marc Todd, Founder and CEO of Skreens, shared insights into his company’s background, its mission, and its multi-view technology, which is already deployed by a major US service provider, and available either directly from Skreens or through MediaKind. You can watch the interview on YouTube here, or embedded …

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 …

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’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 …

This article is about a video lesson that computes the bandwidths savings afforded by the FFmpeg-based implementations of VP9 (libvpx-VP9), H.264 (x264), HEVC (x265), and AV1 (libaom-AV1). The lesson uses the Netflix convex hull analysis to build unique encoding ladders for each test clip and codec and shows why BD-Rate figures don’t accurately predict real-world savings. Towards the end, it …