Ben Waggoner

The birth of the VC-1 Encoder SDKs will reduce the need for these over the next few months, but Alex has updated his WMV PowerToy and also revised our documentation about the registry key options.Here's the new PowerToy. It mainly removes a few options that we determined weren't in the Format SDK 11…

I've had a number of requests for how to find me and Microsoft at IBC, so here's the details. First, Microsoft is in its own space - the Topaz Lounge (2nd floor above the IPTV area). Beyond the codec team, we also have big presences from Silverlight, Mediaroom, and the Interactive Media Manager. We…

It's been a long road, but today was the big day for Silverlight to hit the world. Scott Guthrie's Blog has got the best detailed summary of the ton of stuff that got announced today. There are four big things relevant to digital media I want to highlight before I hop on the plane for IBC. I'll be…

Ancient HistoryCompression, although an obsession with me since I was 19, didn't appear to be a career option until many years after that. My years at Hampshire College were spent essentially majoring in neuropsychology, minoring in computer science, and spending my evening and weekends helping out…

The third and last part of my interview with Halstead York is now up.It covers our days in the bleeding edge of CD-ROM multimedia, how the economics of production is opening up filmmaking to a whole new kind of carreer, and DRM.One thing I should expand on a little more on a big reason why URGE is…

Brandon noted that I never registered my blog on Technorati!So here's the requisite code (assuming I can post it in correctly):Technorati Profile

Compression guru Brandon Wirtz reminds me he is both the Omniscient Deity of Video and Greatest Living American. And we compression nerds need to stick together (because no one else will)...I'm happy to report I remain the World's Greatest Compressionist after using that as a .sig for six weeks back…

 In the pleasures of software development, the joy of removing useless features is a close second to adding useful ones. To that Alex Zambelli has released a minor update to WMV9 PowerToy, simplifying a few modes. First, some of the Perceptual Optimization modes that we discovered actually do…

Part 2 of my Halstead York interview is now up, wherein we discuss VC-1, Silverlight, frame rate unsampling, and many other things. Part 3 talking about DRM (save the most contentious for last!) will be up soon.

So, we've made a couple of HD clips now - how about on the other end of the size spectrum? Let's talk about compressing for the Zune. As, usual, we'll use the Elephant's Dream source. Zune.net has some reasonably detalied compression recommendations for targeting the Zune, and the settings are…