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1 week ago | 
streamingmedia.com | Jan Ozer
A recent paper from Friedrich-Alexander University benchmarks energy consumption and compression efficiency for six video codecs across software and hardware decoders. While the study uses VP9 as a reference, the more relevant comparisons for today’s streaming environment are between H.264 and HEVC in hardware, and AV1 and VVC in software, reflecting real-world deployments.
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1 month ago | 
streamingmedia.com | Jan Ozer
With AV1 hardware decode on mobile devices stuck in the mid-to-low teens as of 2025, and with VVC at zero, it’s clear that the race to supplant H.264 and HEVC will be contested with software-only decoding. As we sit here in 2025, we know that Meta has aggressively started distributing AV1 streams for software-only playback and has even co-created an open source project called VCAT (Video Codec Acid Test) to help benchmark mobile devices.
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1 month ago | 
streaminglearningcenter.com | Jan Ozer
If you’re optimizing x265 for speed, enabling Wavefront Parallel Processing (WPP) looks like a no-brainer. Table 1 shows a staggering 7.3x improvement in encoding time. A 3:15 encode with WPP turns into a painful 23:51 without it. The quality penalty? Negligible. VMAF drops just 0.19, with the low-frame VMAF off by only 0.77 (low-frame is the lowest VMAF score of any frame in the video, a predictor of transient quality issues).
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1 month ago | 
streamingmedia.com | Jan Ozer
In this interview with Streaming Media contributing editor Jan Ozer, Gary Hunsberger, general manager of U.S. operations at NPAW (Nice People At Work), outlines the company’s approach to end-to-end quality monitoring, actionable data, and monetization support. Hunsberger, who joined NPAW seven weeks before NAB 2025, shares how the company differentiates itself in a crowded analytics market, discusses future AI integration plans, and previews growth initiatives in the U.S. and Canada.
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1 month ago | 
streaminglearningcenter.com | Jan Ozer
Articles, Codecs
85 Views
I’ve been involved in a seemingly never-ending debate that started with the dubious (to me) concept of blaming Brightcove’s recent layoffs on HEVC licensing practices. The three questions involved are:Was HEVC’s licensing structure an aberration or similar to other technologies? Was HEVC a commercial success despite these licensing practices?
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1 month ago | 
streamingmedia.com | Jan Ozer
In this interview withStreaming Mediacontributing editor Jan Ozer,Oz Krakowski, Chief Business Development Officer atDeepdub, discusses how the company delivers emotionally rich AI dubbing for media and entertainment clients. From crime documentaries to sports and theatrical releases, Deepdub’s hybrid approach blends machine learning with creative talent to localize content at scale while maintaining quality and nuance.
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1 month ago | 
streamingmedia.com | Jan Ozer
In this interview withStreaming Mediacontributing editor Jan Ozer,Lilly Bond, Vice President of Marketingat3Play Media, discusses how the company has evolved from one of the earliest captioning providers into a full-serviceaccessibility and localizationpartner. With 15 years in the business, 3Play now offers captioning, subtitling, audio description, andhybrid AI/human dubbingservices for customers looking to comply with accessibility laws and expand into global markets.
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1 month ago | 
streamingmedia.com | Jan Ozer
In this interview withStreaming Mediacontributing editor Jan Ozer,Narayanan “Raj” Rajan, CEO ofMedia Excel, reflects on his first year at the helm of one of the most established names in the encoding industry. Rajan discusses how Media Excel is reasserting its relevance with the Hero platform—an encoder/transcoder/packager suite—and why live streaming, low latency, and AI-optimized encoding remain at the heart of the company’s strategy.
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2 months ago | 
streamingmediaglobal.com | Jan Ozer
Three licensors of the Via LA HEVC Patent Pool (M&K Holdings, Gensquare, and Tagivan II) have filed a patent infringement suit against Microsoft in the Landgericht Duesseldorf court in Germany, alleging unlicensed use of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) technology in several Microsoft products. The Via LA HEVC patent pool, which now covers VVC as well, covers patents essential to the HEVC video compression standard.
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2 months ago | 
streamingmedia.com | Jan Ozer
In November 2024, Wowza appointed Krish Kumar CEO. Wowza provides foundational technologies to many name-brand products and services, as well as streaming functionality to tens of thousands of developers integrating video into their operations. Understanding where Kumar plans to take Wowza is critical to all those whose businesses touch streaming video. To learn more about Krish and Wowza’s future direction, contributing editor Jan Ozer interviewed him about ten days before NAB 2025.
