Forget the Fractured Landscape: H.264 Makes Encoding Easier
People get a lot of things out of the Streaming Media conferences: contacts, jobs, ideas. Jan Ozer got a book: the just-published Video Compression for Flash, Apple Devices and HTML5.
"The real genesis of it was I'd been teaching seminars at Streaming Media conferences for the last three or four years, primarily on H.264, so I said, Let me just turn the seminar into a book," said Ozer.
Speaking at a red carpet interview during the recent Streaming Media East conference in New York City, Ozer said that he added material on adaptive streaming, live streaming, and encoding tools to round out the title.
So as an expert on encoding for the web, how does Ozer see the fractured landscape of devices, formats, and codecs? Thanks to the rise of the H.264 codec, he said, offering video has gotten easier.
"Things have actually gotten better over the last year, because the H.264 standard has become the focal point of technologies that can actually take an H.264 stream and transmux it, which basically means put it in a different container format, for multiple targets," said Ozer. Wowza Media Server 2 was the first tool he saw that could do that, he added.
"If you're producing today, typically your high-level challenges are, number one, I need a desktop technology, and that can be Flash or Silverlight, and number two, I want to hit iDevices, and number three, then you'll start to look at the other mobile devices out there," said Ozer.
No longer having to encode separately for the desktop and Apple iOS devices has been a big time-saver.
For more from Ozer, watch the full interview below.
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