Video Encoding

It’s been an exciting time following the progress of the royalty free video codec AV1 over the past year and April might just be the most exciting active month in the amount of news we got about AV1! It’s not every day that media industry giants such as Netflix, Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, ARM, Facebook, Nvidia, Intel, Cisco and many others agree on the same technology stack! Samsung joins the party The month started with Samsung announcing they were joining the Alliance of Open Media Board at the highest level....

It is 2019 and we need to make a decision about GIFs (no, not that one! We’re never going to be able to decide that one!). GIFs take up a massive amount of space (often multiple megabytes!) and if you’re a web developer, then that’s completely against your ethos! As a web developer, you want to minimize the bits your users need to download so that your website loads fast. That’s why you minify javascript, optimize PNGs, JPEGs and sometimes turn JPEGs to WebPs as well....

Video encoding has always been a fairly compute intensive task. With every new generation of video encoders, more computational power has been required to achieve the compression benefits. HEVC/H.265 is the latest state of the art video compression standard with x265 being the most popular open-source encoder used for encoding into the HEVC/H.265 format. In comparison to AVC/H.264 (the previous state of the art encoding format), HEVC offers about double the data compression ratio at the same level of video quality, or substantially improved video quality at the same bit rate....