Discover In-Depth Pre-Conference Training at Streaming Media West
Streaming Media West will be held at the Westin Bonaventure November 19 and 20 (Tuesday and Wednesday) with pre-conference sessions on Monday the 18th. I'll be hosting or participating in two pre-conference sessions and three conference sessions. Here are the dates, times, and descriptions.
The first pre-conference session, Introduction to ABR Production and Delivery, is a focused onboarding session for those new to streaming media, both within the industry and in the corporate space. If you or any others in your shop need a quick introduction to ABR streaming and associated concepts, consider this three-hour session which is scheduled for Monday, November 18 at 9:00 AM.
I excerpted two mini-lessons from the course that you can download as a preview. The first identifies the optimal x264 encoding preset by showing the encoding time/quality tradeoff for each preset. The bottom line is that if you’re using the slow or even medium preset, you might be able to save encoding time with minimal quality impact by switching to the fast preset. You can download that handout.
The other lesson identifies and defines the components of a typical OTT workflow, including encoding, packaging, DRM, QoS, QoE, and player, then identifies the primary vendors for each product or service. If you’re trying to understand how the buzzwords and companies fit together, you’ll find it useful, and you can download it.
Later in the day, I’m teaching a session entitled Objective Quality Metrics 2D and 3D: What They Are, How to Compute Them, and How to Use Them. This is a wonky course on what objective metrics are and do, and how to use them to benchmark encoders and codecs and to identify the optimal encoding presets and other encoding parameters. If you're been yearning for a deep dive into metrics like VMAF and SSIMPLUS and tools like rate-distortion curves and BD-metrics, this is for you. There’s a preview lesson on tuning for metrics that you can download. This three-hour session is Monday, November 18 at 1:30 PM and will involve lots of hands-on testing.
For those who can’t make the pre-conference session on metrics, I’m also presenting a conference session entitled How-To Fine-Tune Your Encoding With Objective Quality Metrics on Tuesday, Tuesday, November 19 from 10:30 AM to 11:15 AM. This session is a high-level introduction to metrics such as VMAF and SSIMPLUS, the tools that can produce the metrics, and applying the data to identify the optimal encoding parameters, build your encoding ladder, or choose the best codec or encoding tool.
One topic crucial to all streaming producers is per-title encoding. If you’re considering deploying a per-title technology, you should check out a panel I’m hosting entitled Applications of Per-Title Encoding (Tuesday, November 19: 4:30 PM to 5:15 PM). During the discussion, Bitmovin, Kaltura, and Mux will describe the mechanics of their per-title systems and share case studies about how per-title encoding has saved bandwidth and/or improved quality of experience for their customers. The companies will provide hard data on how per-title encoding has helped their respective customers, which should be of great value to potential implementors.
My final session is Hardware Transcoding Solutions for the Cloud. During the session, I’ll detail the results of quality and performance tests performed on codecs from Intel, NVIDIA, and NGCodec as compared to x264 and x265. If you’re considering your options for cloud transcoding for live events and similar applications, this session is for you. It’s scheduled for Wednesday, November 20 from 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM.
Register for Streaming Media West 2019
Image of OTT ecosystem components courtesy of Jan Ozer.
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