Mux

Video: How Libre Can you Go?

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones


Many companies would love to be using free codecs, unencumbered by patents, rather than paying for HEVC or AVC. Phil Cluff shows that, contrary to popular belief, it is possible stream with free codecs and get good coverage on mobile and desktop.

Phil starts off by looking at the codecs available and whether they’re patent encumbered with an eye to how much of the market can actually decode them. Free codecs and containers like WebM, VP8 etc. are not supported by Safari which reduces mobile penetration by half. To prove the point, Phil presents the results of his trials in using HEVC, AVC and VP8 on all major browsers.

Whilst this initially leaves a disappointing result for streaming with libre codecs on mobile, there is a solution! Phil explains how an idea from several years ago is being reworked to provide a free streaming protocol MPAG-SASH which avoids using DASH which is itself based on ISO BMFF which is patent encumbered. He then explains how open video players like video.js can be modified to decode libre codecs.

With these two enhancements, we finally see that coverage of up to 80% on mobile is, in principle, possible.

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Speakers

Phil Cuff Phil Cluff
Streaming Specialist,
Mux

Video: How Video is Affected by Human Physiology

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

How can we make video more appealing to humans? We’ve evolved to live a certain way and this has defined – and will continue to define – our video technologies. MUX founder Jon Dahl talks to us here about the ways in which human physiology drives viewing habits.

Vertical vs. horizontal video, angular resolution and how the typical viewing distances of computers, TVs and other devices affects what resolution we can perceive are all discussed. Jon moves on to frequencies both of audio and video where frame rates and flicker are important and where physics comes into play alongside biology.

Even for the experienced, this talk is bound to bring something new and is a great tour of the fundamentals of the visual perception that our industry relies on and strives to please day in, day out.

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Free registration required

This talk was given at Streaming Tech Sweden which is an annual conference from Eyvinn Technology. Streamed on their own video platform, talks are initially available exclusively to all conference attendees, but are released free-to-view during the subsequent year. Free registration is required to watch the videos.

Speaker

John Dahl John Dahl
Founder,
MUX

Video: Understanding Video Performance: QoE is not QoS

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Mux’s Justin Sanford explains the difference between Quality of Service and Quality of Experience; the latter being about the entire viewer experience. Justin looks at ‘Startup time’ showing that it’s a combination of an number of factors which can include loading a web page showing the dependence of your player on the whole ecosystem.

Justin discusses rebuffering and what ‘quality’ is when we talk about streaming. Quality is a combination of encoding quality, resolution but also whether the playback judders.

“Not every optimisation is a tradeoff, however startup time vs. rebuffering is a canonical tradeoff.”

Justin Sanford, Mux

Finally we look at ways of dealing with this, including gathering analytics, standards for measuring quality of experience, and understanding the types of issues your viewers care most about.

From San Francisco Video Tech.

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Speaker

Justin Sanford Justin Sanford
Product Manager,
Mux

Video: Per-title Encoding at Scale

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

MUX is a very pro-active company pushing forward streaming technology. At NAB 2019 they have announced Audience Adaptive Encoding which is offers encodes tailored to both your content but also the typical bitrate of your viewing demographic. Underpinning this technology is machine learning and their Per-title encoding technology which was released last year.

This talk with Nick Chadwick looks at what per-title encoding is, how you can work out which resolutions and bitrates to encode at and how to deliver this as a useful product.

Nick takes some time to explain MUX’s ‘convex hulls’ which give a shape to the content’s performance at different bitrates and helps visualise the optimum encoding parameters the content. Moreover we see that using this technique, we see some surprising circumstances when it makes sense to start at high resolutions, even for low bitrates.

Looking then at how to actually work out on a title-by-title basis, Nick explains the pros and cons of the different approaches going on to explain how MUX used machine learning to generate the model they created to make this work.

Finishing off with an extensive Q&A, this talk is a great overview on how to pick great encoding parameters, manually or otherwise.

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Speaker

Nick Chadwick Nick Chadwick
Software Engineer,
Mux Inc.