Tag Archives: Featured-Posts

Wowza just released the Video Intelligence Framework, or VIF. According to my article in Streaming Media Magazine, VIF is an AI inference module that runs inside Wowza Streaming Engine, rather than in a separate NVR/VMS stack or a cloud video AI service. It samples frames from streams already flowing through the engine, runs them through computer-vision models on a local …

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 …

Developing a metrics tool is the easy part. Wire up FFmpeg, shell out to libvmaf, parse the JSON, draw a pretty line chart. It’s a weekend project, and the part they show you at vibe-coding camp. The part they don’t show you are the edge cases: the files that are a frame short, the variable frame rates that quietly drift, the …

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. …

Deep Render entered 2024 with real technical progress on its AI-based codec. The team had a working model, encoding and decoding live in FFmpeg and VLC, published research, funding, and a belief that AI-based compression represented a step change rather than an academic experiment. What they lacked was sustained visibility with streaming professionals who make codec decisions. The gap was …

Every streaming service runs on a business model which shapes everything from content acquisition to monetization. This PDF walks through the core models every professional should know: SVOD, AVOD, TVOD, FAST, vMVPD, and Hybrid. Each slide explains how the model works and highlights a key insight into its strengths and challenges. For a deeper look at how these models combine …

I just launched Streaming Monetization 101, a 50+ lesson, roughly seven-hour course created in partnership with the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA). It’s available now through SVTA University for $399. The course provides new hires in streaming services and the companies that support them with a comprehensive, real-world understanding of how platforms generate and grow revenue. It covers the business …

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 …