Tag Archives: Featured-Posts

Jan Ozer here. I’m hosting a series of free webinars this summer covering streaming fundamentals, encoding with H.264, HEVC, AV1, VVC, LCEVC, and encoding and transcoding for live streaming. The classes should benefit newbies and experienced compressionists alike. By way of background, I’m updating my book, Video Encoding by the Numbers. When I wrote the first edition, I backed all …

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 …

Like most encoding professionals, I’ve followed AI-related streaming advancements for the last few years. I’m presenting a session entitled “Beyond the Hype: A Critical Look at AI in Video Streaming” at Dan Rayburn’s Streaming Summit at NAB in Las Vegas on Monday, April 15, from 1:30 PM to 2:00 PM PST (room W110). I will cover ingest to playback, including …

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 …

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, …