Learning

Pleased to share another five-star review of my online course Streaming Media 101: Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals. As the course tagline details, “This course teaches the fundamentals and skills necessary to succeed in a streaming media-related job, whether you’re producing and distributing streaming media or creating the tools, technologies, and services necessary to do so.” A recent student, …

I’m teaching two boot camps (virtually) at Streaming Media West, one for VOD and the other for live streaming; each costs $199. The courses are designed for newbies who need to get up to speed quickly on these topics. Here’s the information for both. W1. Streaming Media Bootcamp, Part 1: Encoding, Packaging, And Delivery For VOD Monday, October 5: 8:00 …

Jan Ozer here. I spent the last 2 months working with four AV1 codecs, benchmarking them against each other and x264 and x265. I’m presenting my findings in this for-fee 75-minute webinar ($149.99).  There are two parts; the first shares what I learned about the codecs, and the second details what I learned about encoding with them and creating the …

Note: This update details how to compute VMAF with FFmpeg on Windows. From my perspective, this feature has gotten progressively less usable and increasingly frustrating. Documentation is poor and the syntax is idiosyncratic and hard to use. If you have any alternative, like Moscow State University’s Video Quality Measurement Tool, I would spend the money and get something that works …

My wife was watching a webinar for CME and there were two physicians with such picture perfect presentation that I just had to snap the image and comment. The list of what these two did right is lengthy and instructive. Both practiced perfect rule-of-thirds positioning, with their eyes about 1/3 down from the top of the frame. For this reason, their …

This article details how Brazilian OTT operator Telecine deployed MediaMelon SmartPlay and decreased bandwidth costs by about 42% while improving the MOS quality of the video delivered. SmartPlay also helped Telecine manage the 4X increase in demand due to COVID-19. This is the third and final story about MediaMelon SmartPlay. The first article describes how SmartPlay works and the benefits …

I recently recorded about ten interviews for a webinar produced by a client. I could have used Zoom or Skype but thought that I could achieve better quality by producing the videos with vMix Call. Briefly, vMix is a live streaming software package and Call is the feature that lets you connect with others via RTC for recording conferences. Some …