Video: 5 Myths About Dolby Vision & HDR debunked

There seem no let up in the number of technologies coming to market and whilst some, like HDR, have been slowly advancing on us for many years, the technologies that enable them such as Dolby Vision, HDR10+ and the metadata handling technologies further upstream are more recent. So it’s no surprise that there is some confusion over what’s possible and what’s not.

In this video, Bitmovin and Dolby the truth behind 5 myths surrounding the implementation and financial impact of Dolby Vision and HDR in general. Bitmovin sets the scene by with Sean McCarthy giving an overview on their research into the market. He explains why quality remains important, simply put to either keep up with competitors or be a differentiator. Sean then gives an overview of the ‘better pixels’ principle underlining that improving the pixels themselves is often more effective than higher resolution, technologies such as wide colour gamut (WCG) and HDR.

David Brooks then explains why HDR looks better, explaining the biology and psychology behind the effect as well as the technology itself. The trick with HDR is that there are no extra brightness values for the pixels, rather the brightness of each pixel is mapped onto a larger range. It’s this mapping which is the strength of the technology, altering the mapping gives different results, ultimately allowing you to run SDR and HDR workflows in parallel. David explains how HDR can be mapped down to low-brightness displays,

The last half of this video is dedicated to the myths. Each myth has several slides of explanation, for instance, the one suggests that the workflows are very complex. Hangen Last walks through a number of scenarios showing how dual (or even three-way) workflows can be achieved. The other myths, and the questions at the end, talk about resolution, licensing cost, metadata, managing dual SDR/HDR assets and live workflows with Dolby Vision.

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Speakers

David Brooks David Brooks
Senior Director, Professional Solutions,
Dolby Laboratories
Hagan Last Hagan Last
Technology Manager, Content Distribution,
Dolby Laboratories
Sean McCarthy Sean McCarthy
Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager,
Bitmovin
Kieran Farr Moderator: Kieran Farr
VP Marketing,
Bitmovin

Video: Reducing peak bandwidth for OTT

‘Flattening the curve’ isn’t just about dealing with viruses, we learn from Will Law. Rather, this is one way to deal with network congestion brought on by the rise in broadband use during the global lockdown. This and other key ways such as per-title encoding and removing the top tier are just two other which are explored in this video from Akamai and Bitmovin.

Will Law starts the talk explaining why congestion happens in a world where ABR (adaptive bitrate streaming) is supposed to deal with this. With Akamai’s traffic up by around 300%, it’s perhaps not a surprise there’s a contest for bandwidth. As not all traffic is a video stream, congestion will still happen when fighting with other, static, data transfers. However deeper than that, even with two ABR streams, the congestion protocol in use has a big impact as will shows with a graph showing Akamai’s FastTCP and BBR where BBR steals all the bandwidth rather than ‘playing fair’.

Using a webpage constructed for the video, Will shows us a baseline video playback and the metrics associated with it such as data transferred and bitrate which he uses to demonstrate the different benefits of bitrate production techniques. The first is covered by Bitmovin’s Sean McCarthy who explains Bitmovin’s per-title encoding technology. This approach ensures that each asset has encoder settings tuned to get the best out of the content whilst reducing bandwidth as opposed to simply setting your encoder to a fairly-high, safe, static bitrate for all content no matter how complex it is. Will shows on the demo that the bitrate reduces by over 50%.

Swapping codecs is an obvious way to reduce bandwidth. Unlike per-title encoding which is transparent to the end-user, using AV1, VP9 or HEVC requires support by the final device. Whilst you could offer multiple versions of your assets to make sure you still cover all your players despite fragmentation, this has the downside of extra encoding costs and time.

Will then looks at three ways to reduce bandwidth by stopping the highest-bitrate rendition from being used. Method one is to manually modify the manifest file. Method two demonstrates how to do so using the Bitmovin player API, and method three uses the CDN itself to manipulate the manifests. The advantage of doing this in the CDN is because this allows much more flexibility as you can use geolocation rules, for example, to deliver different manifests to different locations.

The final method to reduce peak bandwidth is to use the CDN to throttle download speed of the stream chunks. This means that while you may – if you are lucky – have the ability to download at 100Mbps, the CDN only delivers 3- or 5-times the real-time bitrate. This goes a long way to smoothing out the peaks which is better for the end user’s equipment and for the CDN. Seen in isolation, this does very little, as the video bitrate and the data transferred remain the same. However, delivering the video in this much more co-operative way is much more likely to cause knock-on problems for other traffic. It can, of course, be used in conjunction with the other techniques. The video concludes with a Q&A.

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Speakers

Will Law Will Law
Chief Architect,
Akamai
Sean McCarthy Sean McCarthy
Technical Product Marketing Manager,
Bitmovin

Webinar: Beginner Crash Course for Video App Development

Tomorrow, December 11th, 8 AM PST / 11 AM EST / 4 PM GMT

The important aspects of writing and developing streaming apps aren’t always clear to the beginner and adding video to apps high on the list for many companies. This can be a very simple menu of videos to delivering premium content for paid subscribers. This webinar is perfect for web developers, independent coders, creative agencies, students and anyone who has a basic understanding of programming concepts but little-to-zero knowledge of video development.

In this talk, Bitmovin Developer Evangelist, Andrea Fassina and Technical Product Marketing Manager, Sean McCarthy will share a variety of lessons learned, on topics such as:

  • What are the most common video app requirements and why?
  • What are common beginner mistakes with video streaming?
  • What are the key components of a video streaming service?
  • How do you measure the quality of a streaming service?
  • What are some quick tips to quickly improve video experience?
  • Where can I go to learn more information?

Register now!

Speakers

Andrea Fassina Andrea Fassina
Developer Evangelist,
Bitmovin
Sean McCarthy Sean McCarthy
Technical Product Marketing Manager,
Bitmovin
Kieran Farr Kieran Farr
VP of Marketing,
Bitmovin

Webinar: Assessing Video Quality: Methods, Measurements, and Best Practices

Wednesday, November 13th, 8am PST / 16:00 GMT

Bitmovin have brought together Jan Ozer from the Streaming Learning Center, their very own Sean McCarthy and Carlos Bacquet from SSIM Wave to discuss how best to assess video quality.

Fundamental to assessing video quality, of course, is what we mean by quality, which artefacts are most problematic and what drives the importance of video quality.

Quality of streaming, of course, is interdependent on the quality of the experience in general. Thinking of an online streaming system as a whole, speed of playback, smooth playback on the player itself and rebuffing are all factors of perceived quality as much as the actual codec encoding quality itself which is what is more traditionally measured.

The webinar brings together experience in measuring quality, monitoring systems and ways in which you can derive your own testing to lock on to the factors which matter to you and your business.

See the related posts below for more from Jan Ozer

Register now!
Speakers

Jan Ozer Jan Ozer
Industry Analyst
Jan Ozer
Sean McCarthy Sean McCarthy
Technical Product Marketing Manager,
Bitmovin
Carlos Bacquet Carlos Bacquet
Solutions Architect
SSIM Wave