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Video: How Does Per-Title Optimization Improve the Streams You Deliver?

Learn more about encoding optimization at Streaming Media's next event.

Watch the complete video of this panel, DT104A: Per-Title Optimization 2.0, in the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Zhou Wang: What is per-title optimization? Actually, the idea is very straightforward simple. It's all about adapting your encoding bitrate for each title based on your video content. If you adapt to each title that's going to be for title optimization, nobody's going to stop you to in live streaming case. Nobody's going to stop you to do per channel optimization, so you have many many channels you want to adapt your bitrate based on the behavior of each channels. No one stop you to do per-scene optimization, per-GOP optimization, per-frame optimization, or per-block optimization. Maybe even go even further, per-pixel optimization.

If you think about this, these are not new ideas. If you look at history and of video compression, early from 30, 40 years ago, when people do intensive video compression research and development. This is the thing that people have been always been trying to do. It's all about video compression, it's all about having a bunch of content with different properties. Within each content the content property also vary from time to time from location to location. How are you going to assign the bits in the most efficient way?

A better name for that is content-adaptive coding. And per-title, and per-scene, or per-block, and per-frame, all of these things are just nothing but special cases of these things.

The trend is actually from fixed-bitrate encoding to content-adaptive encoding. The intuitive ideal is very simple and straightforward, because there is easier content, and there is more difficult content. For easier content you want to use a lower bitrate. For difficult content you want to use higher bitrate. That's the only intuition behind that. In the end, you're expecting to get some benefit.

There are two kinds of benefits. One is, overall you're going to reduce bitrate on average. The reason is because, you're kind of assuming, from most of the content you’re going to work with, that easier content is going to be most of the stuff. Relatively difficult content is going to be a smaller proportion of all the content you have. I think that's probably the case in most applications. Then on average, you're going to reduce the overall bitrate.

The second thing is, you can reduce your quality variation. Because you assign more bitrate to more difficult content and less bitrate to easier content, then overall the quality is going to be smoother. These are the major benefits.

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