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 …
Read More »Streaming Learning Center Goes Mobile
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 …
Read More »Encoding Ladder: Choosing the Best Codec for Streaming Video
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 …
Read More »Another Five-Star Review for Streaming Production Course
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 …
Read More »Computing Break Even on Codec Deployments
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 …
Read More »Real-World Bandwidth Savings from VP9, HEVC, and AV1
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 …
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