Compression

Wow, the year just keeps skipping past; this post has been on my to-do list for a month now. And my compression classes are approaching apace, with signups for Stanford already open, and Portland State just a few weeks away! Beyond all the changes in the technology, I’ve got a structural change as…

Windows 7 Beta is out today. It’s free to participate in, so if you’re interested, please check it out and give us feedback. To whet the appetites of my compressionist friends, one much-requested new feature in the Format SDK .dll in Windows 7: It now can go up to 8-way threading, compared to the…

As you may recall, we released the VC-1 Encoder SDK Professional as as free download. That included a very basic command-line encoder along the lines of Alex Zambelli’s WMCmd.vbs, but with much more limited input support and no preprocessing. A fellow called Kurtnoise13 jumped on it on the Doom9…

I’ve had a bunch of emails lately from people still using Windows Media Encoder for a variety of reasons. A surprising number of people seem to be using ancient versions of actual encoder .dll files, so I figured it was time for one-last roundup post for best practices with WME and the old Format…

Now, this is a blog post! Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer for Netflix, has just put up a great blog post talking about their encoding workflow for their video streaming services. It’s full of awesomeness, but I wanted to excerpt the section describing their 1st gen, 2nd gen, and HD encoding…

It's been discussed for a while, but the time is now - Netflix has just announced Silverlight 2 will power their streaming video service, which had been Windows-only until now. Silverlight 2 adds support for PlayReady DRM, so we now have the same DRM support on Mac and Windows. The service will be…

The first public release canditate (RCo) for Silverlight 2 is now available for download by developers. While anyone can install it, the main goal is for developers to make sure they aren't hit by any breaking changes for Silverlight 2 RTM so they can fix any issues. No one will be auto-updated to…

James Clarke has a blog post up describing some of the new features in the forthcoming Expression Encoder 2 Service Pack 1.It's got some great new stuff, and we're demoing it here at Streaming Media West this week.Read the whole post - there's lots of good stuff in there. A couple of my favories…

So, our big IBC press announcement went out this morning. Lots of blog-worthy stuff in there, but as a compression nerd, it's the codec stuff I'm going to talk about first. The big news is that, yes, we're going to add support for MPEG-4 to Silverlight, in the version coming after the…

I have many ways of reminding my wife I'm an hopeless video nerd. Among them is that I only pay attention to the Emmy Awards she's watching when the recap of the technical awards comes on. So, I was really excited that our own Dr. Gary Sullivan, chairman of the Joint Video Team, was on hand last…