How Norsk Approaches Emerging Streaming Codecs and Protocols
With its focus on helping customers build effective live-streaming workflows and meeting streamers where they are in terms of prevalent codecs and protocols—which, Norsk’s Steve Strong acknowledged at the conference, usually still means H.264—how does it anticipate where users might be going when it comes to supporting new codecs like VVC, whatever the current or near-future playback challenges might be?
Strong explains his company’s considerations in conversation with Andy Beach in this clip from May’s Streaming Media Connect.
Join conference chair Andy Beach and other streaming media experts in person Oct. 6–8 in Santa Monica, CA, for more thought leadership, actionable insights, and lively debate at Streaming Media 2025.
Codec and Protocol Agnosticism
Media and AI strategist Andy Beach prompts Norsk CTO Steve Strong to expand on his previous comment that VVC is not ready for a live pipeline, asking what future-looking considerations Norsk does have.
Strong emphasizes Nork’s flexibility and adaptability in handling various codecs and protocols. Norsk is agnostic when it comes to resolution, frame rate, and formats, and new technologies can come into play without Norsk having to overhaul its existing systems. Customers are mainly interested in quality and bit rate, he says, which is admittedly at odds with his claim that everyone is still using H.264. “I think people are nervous about starting to deliver video that maybe doesn’t play,” he suggests. “Quite a lot of our customers have got regulatory requirements. [T]hey’re very conservative on that front.”
To Strong, this is why VVC makes sense despite its playback problems, but Norsk doesn’t actually work on the playback side. “We’re very much on the origination production side, but of course until you can get playback, then that ripples all the way back to the start,” he says. Norsk is seeing use of AV1 and HEVC more widely for ingest purposes because that’s a more restricted environment. “And could I imagine some of the newer codes coming into play on that side of things? Absolutely. I could see that being something that will happen more aggressively than on the outbound side. Ditto with protocols like media over QUIC,” Strong adds.
‘Turning Some Bugs Into a Feature’
Strong goes into aspects of quality. With simple visual quality, all of the codecs are passable if the settings are configured correctly. With the production quality of the software, “even when it’s an SDK, you need the thing to be reliable. If you’re running a live stream, you don’t get the chance to do it twice. So if the thing crashes, you’ve got a problem.” He thinks back to the early days of using the Intel Media SDK on top of Quick Sync, calling it “terrible. It leaked memory, it leaked file handles, and every now and then it crashed.” (Strong is fine with criticizing it, he notes, because it’s been deprecated.)
The lesson Norsk learned from that experience was to ensure that playback wasn’t interrupted. Even if software crashed, the company could “carry on with no degradation to the viewer’s experience. They couldn’t tell. So you could sit there and literally be playing back the video—live video coming in, live video going out—and you could just do a kill on our process that was running the Quick Sync process and … it just carried on going.”
“You turned some bugs into a feature,” Beach chimes in.
Strong agrees, saying, “Anyone else using Quick Sync probably had those bugs too.” Engineering around bugs shouldn’t be how you spend your time, though, he believes. “You want to spend your effort putting on function that makes the user experience better.”
The Norsk Approach
Beach praises Norsk’s flexibility: “I got to see some of your demos right after NAB, and you’re very flexible on both codecs and protocols you support on the inbound and even being able to set up some of the redundancies. And I think that becomes critical as part of the user experience. It’s a bit outside the transcode pipeline, but it definitely goes back to that viewability piece.” He asks Strong to speak to that.
Strong lays out Norsk’s philosophy of having a system that lets customers build whatever they need as they discover they need it, which is why being agnostic on codecs, protocols, and formats is so important. Norsk’s role is to provide the architecture. “That means when you want to add a new one, it doesn’t change your whole system,” he explains. “So you could have a Norsk setup that’s doing a couple of SRTs in and doing a transcode and some graphic overlays and whatever, and pumping out low-latency HLS to Akamai. And then you could have a change request that comes along and say, ‘I now need some RTMP in as well.’ And that’s fine. That’s easy to do. That doesn't mean you’ve got to throw everything away and start again.”
To close the conversation, Strong discusses the NDI support Norsk announced at NAB and previews Norsk’s current work with 2110, which is compatible with the ASEP-based codecs.
Related Articles
As debates over codec choices in the streaming world range from H.264 to AV1 and HEVC and beyond, what drives decision-making when it comes to codec choices for solution and service providers helping creators and customers get video online for live and VOD consumption? According to Meta's Hassene Tmar and Norsk's Steve Strong, key factors include software and hardware support and compatibility, bitrate reductions, latency constraints, and more, as the two explain in this discussion with Alchemy Creations' Andy Beach from May's Streaming Media Connect.
06 Jun 2025
Media Over QUIC aspires to streamline the entire streaming process by bringing both contribution and distribution into a single protocol again, reducing the need for intermediary transformations. Since MoQ is still in the early stages of development, it will take some time to see it deliver on this promise.
05 Dec 2024
Dipping your toe into custom live media workflows is an extremely complex task, and Norsk is all about that--now more than ever, with the impending launch of the no-code Norsk Studio.
29 Feb 2024
Companies and Suppliers Mentioned