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Episode 365 of the John1911 podcast is now live. This is a guns and politics episode, combined. Coyote Door testing. French FRF2 pulled out of storage. Danny is getting a VP9. New Staccato P4 disappoints. Will DOGE uncover Republican corruption? Is there more to the Mitch McConnell story? Car companies dumping EV's for V8's! Police blotter report. Danny & Marky John1911.com "Shooting Guns & Having Fun"
The boys return after 2 weeks off. Tom SBRs a MP5 and performs VP9 surgery. Jared goes to sniper school. Robert gets and 10mm and joins Kevin to shoot an Area match and we discuss VR training and its worth. ---- Show Sponsors: Rune Tactical Dominate Defense W-74 Guide Rods Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@paracastfirearmspodcast905 Telegram: https://t.me/paracastpodcast Patreon: patreon.com/user?u=16370931
Tom shoots his VP9 and treats Robert to the GLI. Jared and Robert do lunges and try to figure out what's being asked of them. Then we talk about what's the meaning of being cheap. ---- Show Sponsors: Rune Tactical Dominate Defense Precision Holsters W-74 Guide Rods Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@paracastfirearmspodcast905 Telegram: https://t.me/paracastpodcast Patreon: patreon.com/user?u=16370931
Well, get ready for 1st degree talk with Officer Jared. Tom gets some weight in the ol' VP9 and Robert gets "catfished" by the new classifier. She thicc bois! ---- Show Sponsors: Rune Tactical Dominate Defense Precision Holsters W-74 Guide Rods Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@paracastfirearmspodcast905 Telegram: https://t.me/paracastpodcast Patreon: patreon.com/user?u=16370931
Robert and Tom diligently do an episode. Tom Talks about returning to USPSA after a 5 month break, and shows off his VP9. Robert discusses his trip down to Las Vegas and seeing U2 at the Sphere. Then we talk shit about he boards "Hit Factor" Trademark. ---- Show Sponsors: Rune Tactical Dominate Defense Precision Holsters W-74 Guide Rods Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@paracastfirearmspodcast905 Telegram: https://t.me/paracastpodcast Patreon: patreon.com/user?u=16370931
Why the Raspberry Pi 5 doesn't meet our expectations, and the x86 boxes you should consider instead.
À votre avis, quels sont les sites et services qui consomment le plus d'internet en France ? Si vous êtes un auditeur assidu du podcast, alors vous savez que les services vidéos et sites de streaming montent largement sur le podium... Mais tout en haut de la montage, on retrouve Netflix ! La compagnie américaine consomme en effet 1/5e de la bande passante française à elle seule !C'est donc d'un poids très lourd que Netflix pèse sur l'internet français d'après l'Arcep. À en croire la dernière étude de l'autorité de régulation des communications, le service de vidéo à la demande représentait à lui seul 20% de la consommation de bande-passante dans le pays en 2021. Il y a un an, l'organisme avait déjà alerté sur cette consommation excessive où, il faut s'en souvenir, Netflix affichait déjà un tel score. Ce n'est pas une situation nouvelle, mais l'enseignement principal, c'est surtout qu'en douze mois, la situation n'a absolument pas changé. À bien y regarder, la part de Netflix sur l'internet français ne cesse d'augmenter. Il y a six ans, en 2016, le géant du divertissement représentait déjà 8% du trafic total. Si l'on regarde juste derrière, Google arrive 2e avec 13% d'occupation de la bande-passante, suivi de près par Akamai et ses serveurs informatiques, et enfin Facebook et Amazon. Je cite le président de l'Arcep, « en 2021, c'est le trafic vidéo qui occupe la majorité de nos réseaux de télécommunications, avec cinq gros fournisseurs qui utilisent 50% de notre trafic » fin de citation.Plusieurs éléments expliquent cette consommation grandissante. En premier lieu, les Français s'intéressent de plus en plus aux services vidéos pour se divertir avec une exigence de latence très faible et de qualité toujours plus élevée. L'Arcep fait d'ailleurs une parenthèse très intéressante dans son étude à propos des codecs et de leur rôle dans l'acheminement des flux vidéo. Si vous ne savez pas ce qu'est un codec, il s'agit tout simplement d'un dispositif qui permet de mettre en œuvre l'encodage et le décodage d'un flux de données, tout en réduisant le poids de ce même flux. Aujourd'hui, la majorité du trafic internet dans le monde est faite de données vidéo compressées. S'il existe certains codecs très performants, capables de réduire drastiquement la bande passante consommée (HEVC, VP9, AV1), ces derniers peuvent créer des incompatibilités, ce que les hébergeurs souhaitent absolument éviter.Bien entendu, la France n'est pas le seul pays touché par ce phénomène, car au niveau mondial, 53% du trafic internet est occupé par de la vidéo sur YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video ou encore Disney+. Côté politique, la Commission européenne planche sur plusieurs mesure pour enrayer cette hausse comme celle d'appliquer une taxe aux GAFAM et aux services de streaming pour participer au financement et à l'entretien des réseaux des opérateurs. Un projet de loi devrait d'ailleurs être présenté à Bruxelles d'ici la fin de l'année. Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.
Today on the Show we have Angela Harrell from H&K USA. Angela is the head of Public Relations for the United States division of H&K. For over half a century, Heckler & Koch has been a leading designer and manufacturer of small arms and light weapons for law enforcement and military forces worldwide. More recently, H&K has brought to market some very popular firearms such as the H&K SP5 and SP5K as well as its popular VP9 pistols of which several new models have been added for 2021.
Here are 2 videos that we have put together for you guys. We talk about the new 3.0 VP9 holsters. We also talk about the APLc weapon light and will we ever make a holster for that light. Enjoy.
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Yuka Ohishi さんをゲストに迎えて、M1 Mac, Chrome, Mac mini, Pixel 5, Google Photos, Fleet などについて話しました。 Show Notes SHURE ダイナミック マイクロフォン BETA58A Recording Dubbed Dialogue In A Home Environment – Netflix Mac新時代突入☄️MacBook Air (M1, 2020) の凄さを解説します！ Zoom Video Calls Drain Apple M1 MacBook Air Battery by Only 10-13% Per Hour A possible universal (“fat”, x86_64-and-arm64) build of Chrome “We are giddy”—interviewing Apple about its Mac silicon revolution Chrome 86 brings password protections for Android and iOS, VP9 for macOS Big Sur Rogue Amoeba | Audio Hijack: Record Any Audio on MacOS Google Pixel 5 Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage on June 1st, 2021 Stadia Premiere Edition Fleets: a new way to join the conversation Slack is getting Instagram-like stories and push-to-talk audio calls Indoor HDTV Antenna - Mohu 26: BTSの魅力について新参ARMYのYukaが語る！ by STILL RENDERING
SD Blu-ray From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia SD Blu-ray disc is a Blu-ray disc on which the main feature is standard-definition video instead of the high-definition video found on typical Blu-ray discs.[1] This is often due to the highest quality version of the feature content only being available in standard definition. Examples might be a concert that was shot on standard definition video, animation produced digitally in standard definition, or a television show that was shot on film but edited and mastered on SD video with the original film subsequently lost (or deemed too costly to go back and re-edit and re-master from). SD video presented on Blu-ray has the potential to look better than that same content on DVD due to the availability of superior video codecs and higher bitrates. AVC and VP9 codecs available for Blu-ray both offer superior picture quality at a given bitrate than the older MPEG2 codec used on DVD (or comparable quality at lower bitrates). Content that might have been over-compressed on DVD with noticeable compression artifacts need not exhibit those artifacts on Blu-ray, resulting in a more faithful and detailed reproduction of the original source master. Lossless audio is also more practical and flexible on Blu-ray. DVD supports lossless PCM, but only in 48khz stereo and the additional storage space required for that lossless PCM audio leaves less available space for the video. In contrast, Blu-ray supports lossless high-resolution multi-channel audio in multiple formats, all while the larger storage available on Blu-ray makes lossless audio much more practical without impacting video quality. An example of an SD Blu-ray disc making advantage of Blu-ray's superior audio is Live at the Rainbow '74 by Queen. The visual content, filmed for TV in 1974, does not meet normal Blu-ray standards and yet releasing as an SD Blu-ray allows for the audio of the concert to be made available in the highest possible quality. Many SD Blu-ray titles are produced for the convenience and cost savings of having content on only one or two Blu-ray discs that would otherwise span many DVDs. [2](e.g. The "SD on BD" release of Samurai Pizza Cats fits all 52 episodes onto a single disc rather than 8 discs for the previous DVD release.) [3] Both Discotek Media and Section23 Films are American anime distributors that have begun releasing SD Blu-ray discs specifically due to positive feedback from their customers concerning the convenience of fitting larger numbers of episodes onto fewer discs. And in this updated video, I also ponder if perhaps it's possible for the same thing to be done with 4K Ultra Blu-Ray. Comments are Welcomed #SDONBD #Blu_Ray #Zaranyzerak #StandardDefinition #DiscoTekMedia #Section23Films #SonicX #SamuraiPizzaCats #4K #UHD #4KUHD #SDON4K #WarnerHomeVideo --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/bwrosas/support
Ep186 of the John1911 Podcast: Antifa Molotov's Themselves. Commander Red is a bitch. UHaul prices sky rocket. Whore checks used to be a thing. ICARUS 320 Module. Lithuania picks VP9. Glock P80 is back. Pelosi set herself up. Can a shotgun be your goto gun? LAX: Ironman seen at 3000 feet. Danny, Marky & Freeze John1911.com "Shooting Guns & Having Fun"
In Folge 19 sprechen die ApfelNerds über die neue iOS-Version 13.6.1 und das macOS Catalina Supplemental Update, die erste Public Beta für watchOS 7, einen neuen Sensor in der Apple Watch 6, über Erfahrungen mit dem watchOS 7-Sleep Tracking, Micro-LED-Displays die noch nicht kommen, VP9-Support für Google, Apple Store-Betrug, MTA fordern Maskenlösung, Nano-Texture, Patente und das Facebook jammert.
On the show today we go to the range to test out the RMR on my VP9 and also to test out the new 17 round mags from HK. We have some political talk and some feedback as well. Please feel free to send in feedback for the show on any topics that you like […]
스탠다드아웃 71번째 로그에서는 팟캐스트 녹음 환경, 아마존닷컴 반품 경험, gRPC 로드 밸런싱 대한 이야기를 나눴습니다. 참가자: @nacyo_t, @raccoonyy, @seapy, @ecleya 정기 후원 - stdout.fm are creating 프로그래머들의 팟캐스트 | Patreon 녹화 환경 소개 α6400 E-mount camera with APS-C Sensor | ILCE-6400 / ILCE-6400L / ILCE-6400M | Sony US FE 16–35 mm G Master Wide-Angle Zoom Lens | SEL1635GM | Sony US DSC-RX100 III Compact Digital Camera | Cyber-shot Pocket Camera | Sony US 4K HDR Camcorder with Fast Hybrid AF | 4K Handycam FDR-AX700 | Sony US FDR-AX60 | デジタルビデオカメラ Handycam ハンディカム | ソニー 홍진경 더 만두 리뷰를 빙자한 a6400 + SEL1635FE + MixPre-3 II + Shure SM57 - YouTube Good genes: Samsung NX500 review posted: Digital Photography Review 인사이트 번역가 모집 도서출판 인사이트 - BPF Performance Tools: Linux System and Application Observability 역자 모집(마감) 시스템 성능 분석과 최적화 - YES24 DTrace - Wikipedia Berkeley Packet Filter - Wikipedia Brendan Gregg’s Homepage 도서출판 인사이트 - Rust in Action 역자 모집(마감) 알라딘: 클린 아키텍처 알라딘: 클린 코드 Clean Code 기계는 어떻게 생각하는가? - YES24 ODK는 구인중 ODK Media HackerRank 유튜브 익스플로어 지원 중단 3월부터 인터넷 익스플로러로 유튜브 못 본다 : IT : 경제 : 뉴스 : 한겨레 WebP - Wikipedia VP9 - Wikipedia 오라클 신한은행 라이센스 분쟁 오라클 “신한은행, 수백억 내놔라” : 클리앙 AWS Outposts 개요 페이지 데이터 베이스 관리 시스템 | MySQL | Amazon Web Services Amazon Aurora 서버리스 - 온디맨드 Auto-scaling 관계형 데이터베이스 - AWS 판교 낙생지구 남판교에 1만가구 주거타운 뜬다…대장동 이어 낙생지구 개발 - 땅집고 > 투자리포트 아마존 반품 이야기 Dart: The World’s Smallest Laptop Adapter by FINsix — Kickstarter Wireless intrusion prevention system - Wikipedia 속도내는 스마트폰 열풍 구글 넥서스원 국내 첫 개통자나와 | 한경닷컴 아이패드 사용 불법이라더니..장관은 예외? - Chosunbiz > 테크 > ICT/미디어 해외 직구 되팔기 ‘불법’이라는 정부… 직구족들 “현실과 괴리” 불만 - 중앙일보 키크론 Keychron – 맥도 윈도우도 문제없다. 신고 안한 샤넬백, 공항서 걸릴 확률은? Smart Noise Cancelling Headphones 700 | Bose Alibaba.com: Manufacturers, Suppliers, Exporters & Importers from the world’s largest online B2B marketplace gRPC 로드밸런싱 gRPC 웹 서버 로드 밸런싱 | 서버 로드 밸런싱 | Amazon Web Services Envoy Proxy - Home Cloud Map – 클라우드 리소스를 위한 서비스 검색 AWS 라이트세일 Amazon Lightsail, 이제 EC2 업그레이드 경로 제공 DigitalOcean – The developer cloud Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison AWS Batch – 쉽고 효율적인 배치 컴퓨팅 기능 – AWS
TABLE OF CONTENT TALKING POINTS EPISODE 5 2/9/2020Welcome to Table of Content. The Elevate community round table show where we discuss all the happenings around streaming, gaming and entertainment. We are joined this week by TigheFighterX1, Symphonic313, and joining us for the first time ever, the extremely talented OdduckOasis. How are you all doing this evening? Quickly tell us about your channels/role in the community.Before we start I want to wish a special happy birthday to our friend and former guest Jazz0ejo. Hope it's a good B-day.Streaming News Twitch streamer demands fans donate hourly or he'll quit Modern Warfare WingsOfRedemption had such a bad time that he pleaded for hourly donations from his fans just to keep a recent broadcast going. Venting his frustration just 40 minutes into his Modern Warfare session, he made a simple demand to viewers in his chat that may have wanted him to keep streaming. “I hate to be like this, but if you want this stream to continue, it's gonna be $10 an hour,” he outlined. “We need to make $10 in donations per hour for this sh*t to continue or I'm just gonna get off.” Looking back on some past videos of his. This is sort of a normal occurrence (Begging for money) How do you feel about streamers begging for money and subs? Does it make you feel bad for them, dislike them? Tighe How Twitch Encourages Fans To Obsess Over Streamers' Viewership Numbers King Gothalion who recently moved to mixer opened up about how he feels growth on twitch. “I started streaming six years ago on Twitch, and it felt like back then everything was more about community,” Michael told Kotaku over the phone. “But now on Twitch, it's very much the second you log in, you're under a microscope in comparison to everybody—not only your friends, but every other broadcaster on the platform He went on to note that he feels like, in the past few years, toxicity has become a big issue on Twitch. He called it a “byproduct of growth,” but also pointed to Twitch's slowly and inconsistently revised terms of service as another possible cause. Mixer, he said, has him in a much more optimistic place, because it “feels like Twitch five years ago.” Take a look under Twitch's hood, and you'll find that it's largely by design. Twitch is a platform made for gamers that, itself, unfurls over time like a game. It has numbers-driven “paths” to Affiliate and Partner statuses, which unlock more money-making options for streamers, as well as an entire achievement system with goals like lassoing together 100 viewers at the same time or streaming for hundreds or thousands of hours total. Do you think focusing on these sorts of metrics is important for streamers or should we just ignore them and enjoy our community? Oasis Destiny 2 streamer becomes the most-subbed solo channel on Twitch Destiny streamer Sean “GLADD” Gallagher has become the most-subbed individual channel on Twitch in February 2020, according to metrics tracking site Twitchtracker.com. Previously, the most-subbed individual streamer on the platform was former Overwatch pro Felix ‘xQc' Lengyel, until GLADD moved ahead of his ranking on February 5. Unlike followers, Twitch streamers' subscriber counts aren't directly available to the public, and many fans have to simply guess at the number of subscribers content creators have gained while on the platform. According to TwitchTracker, all of GLADD's 32,443 were paid (that means no Prime subs) and, interestingly enough, 21,890 of those paid subs were gifted ones. Is this a tracking method you were aware existed and have you ever used it to look up your favorite streamer? Symphonic Guys for any of you that havent seen we can all have those terrible streams where everything goes wrong. I have them (soty) and so do Big streamers. Doc Disrespect had a bit of a stream of the year this past week lets watch. No real question guys but thought it would be worthwhile to point out even top guys have basic tech issues from time to time.Gaming News Xbox says Nintendo and Sony no longer main rivals Phil Spencer, Microsoft's head of gaming, said he now considered Amazon and Google as his top rivals because of their cloud-computing infrastructure. But Mr Spencer said his "traditional" rivals Nintendo and Sony were out of step with the future of gaming. Saying "That's not to disrespect Nintendo and Sony but the traditional gaming companies are somewhat out of position." With cloud gaming, players do not need to buy a games console. Instead, the games are run on servers in huge data centres with the footage streamed over the internet to a TV, computer, smartphone or tablet.It means players do not need to buy discs or download games and software updates, which can take a long time. However, it requires a fast and reliable internet connection to stream the games. What changes going forward do you think we will see from data and traditional media companies to this big change in the way we consume games? TigheFighter The PS5's next-gen audio tech could transform your gaming experience – here's how The PS5 is looming on the horizon, and while we don't know everything that the next-gen console will offer, we do know that the PlayStation 5 will be packing some very interesting audio tech, as well as ray-tracing and backwards-compatibility. In an April 2019 interview with Wired, the console's lead architect Mark Cerny confirmed that the PS5 will support what he calls "3D audio" – something he says will "make you feel more immersed in the game as sounds come at you from above, from behind, and from the side". Although the PS5's audio specs haven't been revealed yet, the 3D audio chip that Cerny alluded to could deliver Dolby Atmos sound with it, bringing it into direct competition with the Xbox One Symph I am gonna let you explain a little about what Atmos is then get your thoughts on its impact on gaming. Coronavirus Outbreak Leads to Delays in Video Game Manufacturing All three of the major game consoles — Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox — are manufactured in Taiwan, which has recorded multiple patients affected with the virus. Nintendo - "We can confirm that the manufacturing of some Nintendo products for the Japanese market has been delayed due to the impact of 2019-nCoV coronavirus outbreak. Nintendo does not anticipate a significant impact on our broader global supply chain for systems and accessories at this time, and product sales in North America and Europe, including preorders, are not affected. We would like to express our concern and support for all those affected by the coronavirus during this challenging time." C. Not just console makers - Private Division said "We're delaying Outer Worlds on Nintendo Switch due to the coronavirus impacting the Virtuous team working on the port, to provide them enough time to finish development. We'll now be releasing the physical version on cartridge. Once we have a new launch date, we'll let you know!" D. On the same day that the city of Wuhan went into quarantine and halted air and rail travel in the wake of the coronavirus, analytics company Apptica identified that the mobile game Plague, Inc. has risen to the top of the App Store's top paid apps. The game is centered around the spread of infectious disease.What do you make guys make of the seemingly growing epidemic and the rise of the plague game? Oasis you first.Entertainment News Netflix begins streaming data-saving AV1 videos on Android Netflix is rolling out support for the new AV1 video codec in its Android app, which the company claims compresses video 20 percent more efficiently than the VP9 codec it currently uses AV1 is important not just because it consumes less mobile data, but because the royalty-free video coding format has the support of the major tech players. The group behind the standard, the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), was founded in 2015 by a group of companies including Amazon, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Netflix, and in 2018 Apple joined their efforts. Engadget notes, enabling the codec for YouTube playback generates a warning that “Streaming AV1 in HD requires a powerful computer.” That makes us wonder how AV1-encoded Netflix videos will impact that battery life of our smartphones. Tighe, what are your thoughts on the tech community seemingly putting their approval behind a format and what do you make of the impact on data vs battery life? Antonio Brown threatens to sue Logan Paul over phony fight poster YouTuber Logan Paul has made no secret of his plans to box NFL star Antonio Brown — but the two have yet to make an official agreement, giving Brown quite the surprise after coming across a fan-made poster for their potential bout. The “rivalry” between Brown and Paul began after the football pro challenged “The Maverick” to a boxing match via Twitter in January. Since then, their feud has grown consistently more heated, with the two finally coming face to face to talk smack after the viral Jake Paul vs AnEsonGib fight on January 30. C. Brown called out the YouTuber in an Instagram post after discovering a fan made poster, which boasted a placeholder date and venue that could easily appear legit to those out of the loop. “Tell Logan to send me the contract, or Imma sue him. Imma sue him like I sued the other YouTuber. I'm about to sue the kid and destroy him, for using the wrong likeness.”Do you guys think this is for theatrics or is Antonio Brown that dumb? Symph It's game on for ‘Mythic Quest': Apple TV+ comedy series set inside a video-game studio A video game development studio is about to launch an eagerly anticipated expansion to its popular role-playing game. This is hardly a typical premise you'd expect out of a TV show, yet it's precisely what you'll find in "Mythic Quest: Raven's Banquet," a new streaming comedy series on Apple TV Plus. Co-created by Rob McElhenney, Megan Ganz and Charlie Day (of “It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia” fame), "Mythic Quest" might best be described as "The Office" meets gamer culture – both in the way it's shot (often with documentary-style camera pushes) and in the hilarious contrast between disparate personalities under pressure to deliver another hit. Also Stars Dani Pudi of Community! Real-life video game publisher Ubisoft was also instrumental in conceiving, producing and consulting for this television series. “Yes, it's a comedy, but also grounded in fact,” adds Kreinik, in a telephone interview. Will you be checking out this sneak peek behind the curtain of the video game industry? Oasis Join us next week at our normal time 9pm EST, We look forward to seeing you here! FOLLOW US ON TWITCH, FACEBOOK, TWITTER, and INSTAGRAMIf you would like to be a guest or have a topic you would like to hear discussed hit us up on twitter or shoot us me an email to zazzaboo@elevatesreams.comThanks, and we will see you next week★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
GGG 239 SHOT 2020 Part 3 - This week Matt and Heinrich finish up the last of the SHOT 2020 announcements. Recover Tactical 20/20 Glock Stabilizer kit https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2020/01/21/recover-tactical-glock-stabilizer-brace/ Vp9 optics ready and capacity increase https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2020/01/21/shot-2020-tfb-industry-day-at-the-range-hk-optics-ready-vp9-and-sp5/ Clear polymer ar15 receivers https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2020/01/20/shot-2020-tfb-industry-day-at-the-range-new-products-from-ati/ AK 20’s https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2020/01/20/shot-2020-arsenals-new-ak-20-series-of-rifles/ YC9 https://www.guns.com/news/2020/01/24/hi-point-offers-update-on-yc9 Nosler 27 https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2020/01/24/shot-2020-new-27-nosler/ Universal Sight pusher https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/shot-show-universal-field-sight-pusher-by-rst/ 2A Armament Ti BCG https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2020/01/24/shot-2020-2a-armaments-new-lightweight-titanium-bolt-carrier-group/ Foldy glocks are coming down in price https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2020/01/24/shot-2020-full-conceal-m3d-s6/ Ruger PCC chassis that takes ar grips and stocks https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2020/01/24/shot-2020-tandemkross-ruger-pcc-chassis/ blackpowder cartridges for muzzle loaders https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2020/01/23/shot-2020-federal-premium-firestick/ New DEAR gun is actually making it to the market https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2020/01/22/shot-2020-shot-shows-simplest-pistol-from-altor-corp/ NAA expands the ranger2 top break mini revolver line https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2020/01/21/north-american-arms-mini-revolvers/ Mdr updates https://youtu.be/solSsoEHCKM Fixit sticks new kits and scope level https://www.instagram.com/p/B7mUFQgDlm2/?igshid=mbihmzkup38x https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2020/01/25/shot-show-2020-fix-it-sticks/ P320/P365 hybrid frame https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2020/01/29/shot-2020-amend2-s300-hybrid-grip-allows-your-p320-to-take-p365-mags/ Sierra to introduce polymer case commercial ammo https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2020/01/29/shot-2020-true-velocity-and-sierra-bullets/ Nemo ar10 recoil reducing bolt and buffer https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2020/02/06/nemo-recoil-reduction-bolt-carrier-group-and-buffer-kit-for-ar-10-pattern-rifles/ Instagram (Matt) Instagram (Heinrich) LFD Research Facebook Apple Podcasts Stitcher Google Play Contact the show directly at geeksgadgetsandguns@gmail.com
Episode 160: Freeze and I have a frank discussion about some issues I have been having with the VP9, holsters and what my CCW pistol should be doing forward? Marky & Freeze John1911.com "Shooting Guns & Having Fun"
Click to watch SPIE Future Video Codec Panel DiscussionRelated episode with Gary Sullivan at Microsoft: VVC, HEVC & other MPEG codec standardsInterview with MPEG Chairman Leonardo Charliogne: MPEG Through the Eyes of it's ChairmanLearn about FastDVO herePankaj Topiwala LinkedIn profile--------------------------------------The Video Insiders LinkedIn Group is where thousands of your peers are discussing the latest video technology news and sharing best practices. Click here to joinWould you like to be a guest on the show? Email: thevideoinsiders@beamr.comLearn more about Beamr--------------------------------------TRANSCRIPT:Pankaj Topiwala: 00:00 With H.264 H.265 HEVC in 2013, we were now able to do up to 300 to one to up to 500 to one compression on a, let's say a 4K video. And with VVC we have truly entered a new realm where we can do up to 1000 to one compression, which is three full orders of magnitude reduction of the original size. If the original size is say 10 gigabits, we can bring that down to 10 megabits. And that's unbelievable. And so video compression truly is a remarkable technology and you know, it's a, it's a marval to look at Announcer: 00:39 The Video Insiders is the show that makes sense of all that is happening in the world of online video as seen through the eyes of a second generation codec nerd and a marketing guy who knows what I-frames and macro blocks are. And here are your hosts, Mark Donnigan and Dror Gill. Speaker 3: 00:39 Dror Gill: 01:11 Today we're going to talk with one of the key figures in the development of a video codecs and a true video insider Pankaj Topiwala. Hello Pankaj and welcome to The Video Insiders podcast. Pankaj Topiwala: 01:24 Gentlemen. hello, and thank you very much for this invite. It looks like it's going to be a lot of fun. Mark Donnigan: 01:31 It is. Thank you for joining Pankaj. Dror Gill: 01:33 Yeah, it sure will be a lot of fun. So can you start by telling us a little bit about your experience in codec development? Pankaj Topiwala: 01:41 Sure, so, I should say that unlike a number of the other people that you have interviewed or may interview my background is fair bit different. I really came into this field really by a back door and almost by chance my degree PhD degree is actually in mathematical physics from 1985. And I actually have no engineering, computer science or even management experience. So naturally I run a small research company working in video compression and analytics, and that makes sense, but that's just the way things go in the modern world. But that the effect for me was a, and the entry point was that even though I was working in very, very abstract mathematics I decided to leave. I worked in academia for a few years and then I decided to join industry. And at that point they were putting me into applied mathematical research. Pankaj Topiwala: 02:44 And the topic at that time that was really hot in applied mathematics was a topic of wavelets. And I ended up writing and edited a book called wavelet image and video compression in 1998. Which was a lot of fun along with quite a few other co authors on that book. But, wavelets had its biggest contribution in the compression of image and video. And so that led me finally to enter into, and I noticed that video compression was a far larger field than image compression. I mean, by many orders, by orders of magnitude. It is probably a hundred times bigger in terms of market size than, than image compression. And as a result I said, okay, if the sexiest application of this new fangled mathematics could be in video compression I entered that field roughly with the the book that I mentioned in 1998. Mark Donnigan: 03:47 So one thing that I noticed Pankaj cause it's really interesting is your, your initial writing and you know, research was around wavelet compression and yet you have been very active in ISO MPEG, all block-based codecs. So, so tell us about that? Pankaj Topiwala: 04:08 Okay. Well obviously you know when you make the transition from working on the wavelets and our initial starting point was in doing wavelet based video compression. When I started first founded my company fastVDO in 1998, 1999 period we were working on wavelet based video compression and we, we pushed that about as much as we could. And at that, at one point we had what we felt was the world's best a video compression using wavelets in fact, but best overall. And it had the feature that you know, one thing that we should, we should tell your view or reader listeners is that the, the value of wavelets in particular in image coding is that not only can you do state of the art image coding, but you can make the bitstream what is called embedded, meaning you can chop it off at anywhere you like, and it's still a decodable stream. Pankaj Topiwala: 05:11 And in fact it is the best quality you can get for that bit rate. And that is a powerful, powerful thing you can do in image coding. Now in video, there is actually no way to do that. Video is just so much more complicated, but we did the best we could to make it not embedded, but at least scalable. And we, we built a scalable wavelet based video codec, which at that time was beating at the current implementations of MPEG4. So we were very excited that we could launch a company based on a proprietary codec that was based on this new fangled mathematics called wavelets. And lead us to a state of the art codec. The facts of the ground though is that just within the first couple of years of running our company, we found that in fact the block-based transformed codecs that everybody else was using, including the implementers of MPEG4. Pankaj Topiwala: 06:17 And then later AVC, those quickly surpassed anything we could build with with wavelets in terms of both quality and stability. The wavelet based codecs were not as powerful or as stable. And I can say quite a bit more about why that's true. If you want? Dror Gill: 06:38 So when you talk about stability, what exactly are you referring to in, in a video codec? Pankaj Topiwala: 06:42 Right. So let's let's take our listeners back a bit to compare image coding and video coding. Image coding is basically, you're given a set of pixels in a rectangular array and we normally divide that into blocks of sub blocks of that image. And then do transforms and then quantization and than entropy coding, that's how we typically do image coding. With the wavelet transform, we have a global transform. It's a, it's ideally done on the entire image. Pankaj Topiwala: 07:17 And then you could do it multiple times, what are called multiple scales of the wavelet transform. So you could take various sub sub blocks that you create by doing the wavelet transfer and the low pass high pass. Ancs do that again to the low low pass for multiple scales, typically about four or five scales that are used in popular image codecs that use wavelets. But now in video, the novelty is that you don't have one frame. You have many, many frames, hundreds or thousands or more. And you have motion. Now, motion is something where you have pieces of the image that float around from one frame to another and they float randomly. That is, it's not as if all of the motion is in one direction. Some things move one way, some things move other ways, some things actually change orientations. Pankaj Topiwala: 08:12 And they really move, of course, in three dimensional space, not in our two dimensional space that we capture. That complicates video compression enormously over image compression. And it particularly complicates all the wavelet methods to do video compression. So, wavelet methods that try to deal with motion were not very successful. The best we tried to do was using motion compensated video you know, transformed. So doing wavelet transforms in the time domain as well as the spatial domain along the paths of motion vectors. But that was not very successful. And what I mean by stability is that as soon as you increase the motion, the codec breaks, whereas in video coding using block-based transforms and block-based motion estimation and compensation it doesn't break. It just degrades much more gracefully. Wavelet based codecs do not degrade gracefully in that regard. Pankaj Topiwala: 09:16 And so we of course, as a company we decided, well, if those are the facts on the ground. We're going to go with whichever way video coding is going and drop our initial entry point, namely wavelets, and go with the DCT. Now one important thing we found was that even in the DCT- ideas we learned in wavelets can be applied right to the DCT. And I don't know if you're familiar with this part of the story, but a wavelet transform can be decomposed using bits shifts and ads only using something called the lifting transform, at least a important wavelet transforms can. Now, it turns out that the DCT can also be decomposed using lifting transforms using only bit shifts and ads. And that is something that my company developed way back back in 1998 actually. Pankaj Topiwala: 10:18 And we showed that not only for DCT, but a large class of transforms called lab transforms, which included the block transforms, but in particular included more powerful transforms the importance of that in the story of video coding. Is that up until H.264, all the video codec. So H.261, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, all these video codecs used a floating point implementation of the discrete cosign transform and without requiring anybody to implement you know a full floating point transform to a very large number of decimal places. What they required then was a minimum accuracy to the DCT and that became something that all codecs had to do. Instead. If you had an implementation of the DCT, it had to be accurate to the true floating point DCT up to a certain decimal point in, in the transform accuracy. Pankaj Topiwala: 11:27 With the advent of H.264, with H.264, we decided right away that we were not going to do a flooding point transform. We were going to do an integer transform. That decision was made even before I joined, my company joined, the development base, H.264, AVC, But they were using 32 point transforms. We found that we could introduce 16 point transforms, half the complexity. And half the complexity only in the linear dimension when you, when you think of it as a spatial dimension. So two spatial dimensions, it's a, it's actually grows more. And so the reduction in complexity is not a factor of two, but at least a factor of four and much more than that. In fact, it's a little closer to exponential. The reality is that we were able to bring the H.264 codec. Pankaj Topiwala: 12:20 So in fact, the transform was the most complicated part of the entire codec. So if you had a 32 point transform, the entire codec was at 32 point technology and it needed 32 points, 32 bits at every sample to process in hardware or software. By changing the transform to 16 bits, we were able to bring the entire codec to a 16 bit implementation, which dramatically improved the hardware implementability of this transfer of this entire codec without at all effecting the quality. So that was an important development that happened with AVC. And since then, we've been working with only integer transforms. Mark Donnigan: 13:03 This technical history is a really amazing to hear. I, I didn't actually know that Dror or you, you probably knew that, but I didn't. Dror Gill: 13:13 Yeah, I mean, I knew about the transform and shifting from fixed point, from a floating point to integer transform. But you know, I didn't know that's an incredible contribution Pankaj. Pankaj Topiwala: 13:27 We like to say that we've saved the world billions of dollars in hardware implementations. And we've taken a small a small you know, a donation as a result of that to survive as a small company. Dror Gill: 13:40 Yeah, that's great. And then from AVC you moved on and you continued your involvement in, in the other standards, right? That's followed. Pankaj Topiwala: 13:47 in fact, we've been involved in standardization efforts now for almost 20 years. My first meeting was a, I recall in may of 2000, I went to a an MPEG meeting in Geneva. And then shortly after that in July I went to an ITU VCEG meeting. VCEG is the video coding experts group of the ITU. And MPEG is the moving picture experts group of ISO. These two organizations were separately pursuing their own codecs at that time. Pankaj Topiwala: 14:21 ISO MPEG was working on MPEG-4 and ITU VCEG was working on H.263, and 263 plus and 263 plus plus. And then finally they started a project called 263 L for longterm. And eventually it became clear to these two organizations that look, it's silly to work on, on separate codecs. They had worked once before in MPEG-2 develop a joint standard and they decided to, to form a joint team at that time called the joint video team, JVT to develop the H.264 AVC video codec, which was finally done in 2003. We participate participated you know fully in that making many contributions of course in the transform but also in motion estimation and other aspects. So, for example, it might not be known that we also contributed the fast motion estimation that's now widely used in probably nearly all implementations of 264, but in 265 HEVC as well. Pankaj Topiwala: 15:38 And we participated in VVC. But one of the important things that we can discuss is these technologies, although they all have the same overall structure, they have become much more complicated in terms of the processing that they do. And we can discuss that to some extent if you want? Dror Gill: 15:59 The compression factors, just keep increasing from generation to generation and you know, we're wondering what's the limit of that? Pankaj Topiwala: 16:07 That's of course a very good question and let me try to answer some of that. And in fact that discussion I don't think came up in the discussion you had with Gary Sullivan, which certainly could have but I don't recall it in that conversation. So let me try to give for your listeners who did not catch that or are not familiar with it. A little bit of the story. Pankaj Topiwala: 16:28 The first international standard was the ITU. H.261 standard dating roughly to 1988 and it was designed to do only about 15 to one to 20 to one compression. And it was used mainly for video conferencing. And at that time you'd be surprised from our point of view today, the size of the video being used was actually incredibly tiny about QCIP or 176 by 144 pixels. Video of that quality that was the best we could conceive. And we thought we were doing great. And doing 20 to one compression, wow! Recall by the way, that if you try to do a lossless compression of any natural signal, whether it's speech or audio or images or video you can't do better than about two to one or at most about two and a half to one. Pankaj Topiwala: 17:25 You cannot do, typically you cannot even do three to one and you definitely cannot do 10 to one. So a video codec that could do 20 to one compression was 10 times better than what you could do lossless, I'm sorry. So this is definitely lossy, but lossy with still a good quality so that you can use it. And so we thought we were really good. When MPEG-1 came along in, in roughly 1992 we were aiming for 25 to one compression and the application was the video compact disc, the VCD. With H.262 or MPEG-2 roughly 1994, we were looking to do about 35 to one compression, 30 to 35. And the main application was then DVD or also broadcast television. At that point, broadcast television was ready to use at least in some, some segments. Pankaj Topiwala: 18:21 Try digital broadcasting. In the United States, that took a while. But in any case it could be used for broadcast television. And then from that point H.264 AVC In 2003, we jumped right away to more than 100 to one compression. This technology at least on large format video can be used to shrink the original size of a video by more than two orders of magnitude, which was absolutely stunning. You know no other natural signal, not speech, not broadband, audio, not images could be compressed that much and still give you high quality subjective quality. But video can because it's it is so redundant. And because we don't understand fully yet how to appreciate video. Subjectively. We've been trying things you know, ad hoc. And so the entire development of video coding has been really by ad hoc methods to see what quality we can get. Pankaj Topiwala: 19:27 And by quality we been using two two metrics. One is simply a mean square error based metric called peak signal to noise ratio or PSNR. And that has been the industry standard for the last 35 years. But the other method is simply to have people look at the video, what we call subjective rating of the video. Now it's hard to get a subjective rating. That's reliable. You have to do a lot of standardization get a lot of different people and take mean opinion scores and things like that. That's expensive. Whereas PSNR is something you can calculate on a computer. And so people have mostly in the development of video coding for 35 years relied on one objective quality metric called PSNR. And it is good but not great. And it's been known right from the beginning that it was not perfect, not perfectly correlated to video quality, and yet we didn't have anything better anyway. Pankaj Topiwala: 20:32 To finish the story of the video codecs with H.265 HEVC in 2013, we were now able to do up to 300 to one to up to 500 to one compression on let's say a 4K. And with VVC we have truly entered a new realm where we can do up to 1000 to one compression, which is three full orders of magnitude reduction of the original size. If the original size is say, 10 gigabits, we can bring that down to 10 megabits. And that's unbelievable. And so video compression truly is a remarkable technology. And you know, it's a, it's a marvel to look at. Of course it does not, it's not magic. It comes with an awful lot of processing and an awful lot of smarts have gone into it. That's right. Mark Donnigan: 21:24 You know Pankaj, that, is an amazing overview and to hear that that VVC is going to be a thousand to one. You know, compression benefit. Wow. That's incredible! Pankaj Topiwala: 21:37 I think we should of course we should of course temper that with you know, what people will use in applications. Correct. They may not use the full power of a VVC and may not crank it to that level. Sure, sure. I can certainly tell you that that we and many other companies have created bitstreams with 1000 to one or more compression and seeing video quality that we thought was usable. Mark Donnigan: 22:07 One of the topics that has come to light recently and been talked about quite a bit. And it was initially raised by Dave Ronca who used to lead encoding at Netflix for like 10 years. In fact you know, I think he really built that department, the encoding team there and is now at Facebook. And he wrote a LinkedIn article post that was really fascinating. And what he was pointing out in this post was, was that with compression efficiency and as each generation of codec is getting more efficient as you just explained and gave us an overview. There's a, there's a problem that's coming with that in that each generation of codec is also getting even more complex and you know, in some settings and, and I suppose you know, Netflix is maybe an example where you know, it's probably not accurate to say they have unlimited compute, but their application is obviously very different in terms of how they can operate their, their encoding function compared to someone who's doing live, live streaming for example, or live broadcast. Maybe you can share with us as well. You know, through the generation generational growth of these codecs, how has the, how has the compute requirements also grown and has it grown in sort of a linear way along with the compression efficiency? Or are you seeing, you know, some issues with you know, yes, we can get a thousand to one, but our compute efficiency is getting to the, where we could be hitting a wall. Pankaj Topiwala: 23:46 You asked a good question. Has the complexity only scaled linearly with the compression ratio? And the answer is no. Not at all. Complexity has outpaced the compression ratio. Even though the compression ratio is, is a tremendous, the complexity is much, much higher. And has always been at every step. First of all there's a big difference in doing the research, the research phase in development of the, of a technology like VVC where we were using a standardized reference model that the committee develops along the way, which is not at all optimized. But that's what we all use because we share a common code base. And make any new proposals based on modifying that code base. Now that code base is always along the entire development chain has always been very, very slow. Pankaj Topiwala: 24:42 And true implementations are anywhere from 100 to 500 times more efficient in complexity than the reference software. So right away you can have the reference software for say VVC and somebody developing a, an implementation that's a real product. It can be at least 100 times more efficient than what the reference software, maybe even more. So there's a big difference. You know, when we're developing a technology, it is very hard to predict what implementers will actually come up with later. Of course, the only way they can do that is that companies actually invest the time and energy right away as they're developing the standard to build prototype both software and hardware and have a good idea that when they finish this, you know, what is it going to really cost? So just to give you a, an idea, between, H.264 and Pankaj Topiwala: 25:38 H.265, H.264, only had two transforms of size, four by four and eight by eight. And these were integer transforms, which are only bit shifts and adds, took no multiplies and no divides. The division in fact got incorporated into the quantizer and as a result, it was very, very fast. Moreover, if you had to do, make decisions such as inter versus intra mode, the intra modes there were only about eight or 10 intra modes in H.264. By contrast in H.265. We have not two transforms eight, four by four and eight by, but in fact sizes of four, eight, 16 and 32. So we have much larger sized transforms and instead of a eight or 10 intra modes, we jumped up to 35 intra modes. Pankaj Topiwala: 26:36 And then with a VVC we jumped up to 67 intro modes and we just, it just became so much more complex. The compression ratio between HEVC and VVC is not quite two to one, but let's say, you know, 40% better. But the the complexity is not 40% more. On the ground and nobody has yet, to my knowledge, built a a, a, a fully compliant and powerful either software or hardware video codec for VVC yet because it's not even finished yet. It's going to be finished in July 2020. When it, when, the dust finally settles maybe four or five years from now, it will be, it will prove to be at least three or four times more complex than HEVC encoder the decoder, not that much. The decoder, luckily we're able to build decoders that are much more linear than the encoder. Pankaj Topiwala: 27:37 So I guess I should qualify as discussion saying the complexity growth is all mostly been in the encoder. The decoder has been a much more reasonable. Remember, we are always relying on this principle of ever-increasing compute capability. You know, a factor of two every 18 months. We've long heard about all of this, you know, and it is true, Moore's law. If we did not have that, none of this could have happened. None of this high complexity codecs, whatever had been developed because nobody would ever be able to implement them. But because of Moore's law we can confidently say that even if we put out this very highly complex VVC standard, someday and in the not too distant future, people will be able to implement this in hardware. Now you also asked a very good question earlier, is there a limit to how much we can compress? Pankaj Topiwala: 28:34 And also one can ask relatively in this issue, is there a limit to a Moore's law? And we've heard a lot about that. That may be finally after decades of the success of Moore's law and actually being realized, maybe we are now finally coming to quantum mechanical limits to you know how much we can miniaturize in electronics before we actually have to go to quantum computing, which is a totally different you know approach to doing computing because trying to go smaller die size. Well, we'll make it a unstable quantum mechanically. Now the, it appears that we may be hitting a wall eventually we haven't hit it yet, but we may be close to a, a physical limit in die size. And in the observations that I've been making at least it seems possible to me that we are also reaching a limit to how much we can compress video even without a complexity limit, how much we can compress video and still obtain reasonable or rather high quality. Pankaj Topiwala: 29:46 But we don't know the answer to that. And in fact there are many many aspects of this that we simply don't know. For example, the only real arbiter of video quality is subjective testing. Nobody has come up with an objective video quality metric that we can rely on. PSNR is not it. When, when push comes to shove, nobody in this industry actually relies on PSNR. They actually do subjective testing well. So in that scenario, we don't know what the limits of visual quality because we don't understand human vision, you know, we try, but human vision is so complicated. Nobody can understand the impact of that on video quality to any very significant extent. Now in fact, the first baby steps to try to understand, not explicitly but implicitly capture subjective human video quality assessment into a neural model. Those steps are just now being taken in the last couple of years. In fact, we've been involved, my company has been involved in, in getting into that because I think that's a very exciting area. Dror Gill: 30:57 I tend to agree that modeling human perception with a neural network seems more natural than, you know, just regular formulas and algorithms which are which are linear. Now I, I wanted to ask you about this process of, of creating the codecs. It's, it's very important to have standards. So you encode a video once and then you can play it anywhere and anytime and on any device. And for this, the encoder and decoder need to agree on exactly the format of the video. And traditionally you know, as you pointed out with all the history of, of development. Video codecs have been developed by standardization bodies, MPEG and ITU first separately. And then they joined forces to develop the newest video standards. But recently we're seeing another approach to develop codecs, which is by open sourcing them. Dror Gill: 31:58 Google started with an open source code, they called VP9 which they first developed internally. Then they open sourced it and and they use it widely across their services, especially in, YouTube. And then they joined forces with the, I think the largest companies in the world, not just in video but in general. You know those large internet giants such as Amazon and Facebook and and Netflix and even Microsoft, Apple, Intel have joined together with the Alliance of Open Media to jointly create another open codec called AV1. And this is a completely parallel process to the MPEG codec development process. And the question is, do you think that this was kind of a one time effort to, to to try and find a, or develop a royalty free codec, or is this something that will continue? And how do you think the adoption of the open source codecs versus the committee defined codecs, how would that adoption play out in the market? Pankaj Topiwala: 33:17 That's of course a large topic on its own. And I should mention that there have been a number of discussions about that topic. In particular at the SPIE conference last summer in San Diego, we had a panel discussion of experts in video compression to discuss exactly that. And one of the things we should provide to your listeners is a link to that captured video of the panel discussion where that topic is discussed to some significant extent. And it's on YouTube so we can provide a link to that. My answer. And of course none of us knows the future. Right. But we're going to take our best guesses. I believe that this trend will continue and is a new factor in the landscape of video compression development. Pankaj Topiwala: 34:10 But we should also point out that the domain of preponderance use preponderant use of these codecs is going to be different than in our traditional codecs. Our traditional codecs such as H.264 265, were initially developed for primarily for the broadcast market or for DVD and Blu-ray. Whereas these new codecs from AOM are primarily being developed for the streaming media industry. So the likes of Netflix and Amazon and for YouTube where they put up billions of user generated videos. So, for the streaming application, the decoder is almost always a software decoder. That means they can update that decoder anytime they do a software update. So they're not limited by a hardware development cycle. Of course, hardware companies are also building AV1. Pankaj Topiwala: 35:13 And the point of that would be to try to put it into handheld devices like laptops, tablets, and especially smartphones. But to try to get AV1 not only as a decoder but also as an encoder in a smartphone is going to be quite complicated. And the first few codecs that come out in hardware will be of much lower quality, for example, comparable to AVC and not even the quality of HEVC when they first start out. So that's... the hardware implementations of AV1 that work in real time are not going to be, it's going to take a while for them to catch up to the quality that AV1 can offer. But for streaming we, we can decode these streams reasonably well in software or in firmware. And the net result is that, or in GPU for example, and the net result is that these companies can already start streaming. Pankaj Topiwala: 36:14 So in fact Google is already streaming some test streams maybe one now. And it's cloud-based YouTube application and companies like Cisco are testing it already, even for for their WebEx video communication platform. Although the quality will not be then anything like the full capability of AV1, it'll be at a much reduced level, but it'll be this open source and notionally, you know, royalty free video codec. Dror Gill: 36:50 Notionally. Yeah. Because they always tried to do this, this dance and every algorithm that they try to put into the standard is being scrutinized and, and, and they check if there are any patents around it so they can try and keep this notion of of royalty-free around the codec because definitely the codec is open source and royalty free. Dror Gill: 37:14 I think that is, is, is a big question. So much IP has gone into the development of the different MPEG standards and we know it has caused issues. Went pretty smoothly with AVC, with MPEG-LA that had kind of a single point of contact for licensing all the essential patents and with HEVC, that hasn't gone very well in the beginning. But still there is a lot of IP there. So the question is, is it even possible to have a truly royalty free codec that can be competitive in, in compression efficiency and performance with the codec developed by the standards committee? Pankaj Topiwala: 37:50 I'll give you a two part answer. One because of the landscape of patents in the field of video compression which I would describe as being, you know very, very spaghetti like and patents date back to other patents. Pankaj Topiwala: 38:09 And they cover most of the, the topics and the most of the, the tools used in video compression. And by the way we've looked at the AV1 and AV1 is not that different from all the other standards that we have. H.265 or VVC. There are some things that are different. By and large, it resembles the existing standards. So can it be that this animal is totally patent free? No, it cannot be that it is patent free. But patent free is not the same as royalty free. There's no question that AV1 has many, many patents, probably hundreds of patents that reach into it. The question is whether the people developing and practicing AV1 own all of those patents. That is of course, a much larger question. Pankaj Topiwala: 39:07 And in fact, there has been a recent challenge to that, a group has even stood up to proclaim that they have a central IP in AV1. The net reaction from the AOM has been to develop a legal defense fund so that they're not going to budge in terms of their royalty free model. If they do. It would kill the whole project because their main thesis is that this is a world do free thing, use it and go ahead. Now, the legal defense fund then protects the members of that Alliance, jointly. Now, it's not as if the Alliance is going to indemnify you against any possible attack on IP. They can't do that because nobody can predict, you know, where somebody's IP is. The world is so large, so many patents in that we're talking not, not even hundreds and thousands, but tens of thousands of patents at least. Pankaj Topiwala: 40:08 So nobody in the world has ever reviewed all of those patent. It's not possible. And the net result is that nobody can know for sure what technology might have been patented by third parties. But the point is that because such a large number of powerful companies that are also the main users of this technology, you know, people, companies like Google and Apple and Microsoft and, and Netflix and Amazon and Facebook and whatnot. These companies are so powerful. And Samsung by the way, has joined the Alliance. These companies are so powerful that you know, it would be hard to challenge them. And so in practice, the point is they can project a royalty-free technology because it would be hard for anybody to challenge it. And so that's the reality on the ground. Pankaj Topiwala: 41:03 So at the moment it is succeeding as a royalty free project. I should also point out that if you want to use this, not join the Alliance, but just want to be a user. Even just to use it, you already have to offer any IP you have in this technology it to the Alliance. So all users around the world, so if tens of thousands and eventually millions of you know, users around the world, including tens of thousands of companies around the world start to use this technology, they will all have automatically yielded any IP they have in AV1, to the Alliance. Dror Gill: 41:44 Wow. That's really fascinating. I mean, first the distinction you made between royalty free and patent free. So the AOM can keep this technology royalty free, even if it's not patent free because they don't charge royalties and they can help with the legal defense fund against patent claim and still keep it royalty free. And, and second is the fact that when you use this technology, you are giving up any IP claims against the creators of the technology, which means that if any, any party who wants to have any IP claims against the AV1 encoder cannot use it in any form or shape. Pankaj Topiwala: 42:25 That's at least my understanding. And I've tried to look at of course I'm not a lawyer. And you have to take that as just the opinion of a video coding expert rather than a lawyer dissecting the legalities of this. But be that as it may, my understanding is that any user would have to yield any IP they have in the standard to the Alliance. And the net result will be if this technology truly does get widely used more IP than just from the Alliance members will have been folded into into it so that eventually it would be hard for anybody to challenge this. Mark Donnigan: 43:09 Pankaj, what does this mean for the development of so much of the technology has been in has been enabled by the financial incentive of small groups of people, you know, or medium sized groups of people forming together. You know, building a company, usually. Hiring other experts and being able to derive some economic benefit from the research and the work and the, you know, the effort that's put in. If all of this sort of consolidates to a handful or a couple of handfuls of, you know, very, very large companies, you know, does that, I guess I'm, I'm asking from your view, will, will video and coding technology development and advancements proliferate? Will it sort of stay static? Because basically all these companies will hire or acquire, you know, all the experts and you know, it's just now everybody works for Google and Facebook and Netflix and you know... Or, or do you think it will ultimately decline? Because that's something that that comes to mind here is, you know, if the economic incentives sort of go away, well, you know, people aren't going to work for free! Pankaj Topiwala: 44:29 So that's of course a, another question and a one relevant. In fact to many of us working in video compression right now, including my company. And I faced this directly back in the days of MPEG-2. There was a two and a half dollar ($2.50) per unit license fee for using MPEG-2. That created billions of dollars in licensing in fact, the patent pool, MPEG-LA itself made billions of dollars, even though they took only 10% of the proceeds, they already made billions of dollars, you know, huge amounts of money. With the advent of H.264 AVC, the patent license went not to from two and a half dollars to 25 cents a unit. And now with HEVC, it's a little bit less than that per unit. Of course the number of units has grown exponentially, but then the big companies don't continue to pay per unit anymore. Pankaj Topiwala: 45:29 They just pay a yearly cap. For example, 5 million or 10 million, which to these big companies is is peanuts. So there's a yearly cap for the big companies that have, you know, hundreds of millions of units. You know imagine the number of Microsoft windows that are out there or the number of you know, Google Chrome browsers. And if you have a, a codec embedded in the browser there are hundreds of millions of them, if not billions of them. And so they just pay a cap and they're done with it. But even then, there was up till now an incentive for smart engineers to develop exciting new ideas in a future video coding. But, and that has been up the story up till now. But when, if it happens that this AOM model with AV1 and then AV2, really becomes a dominant codec and takes over the market, then there will be no incentive for researchers to devote any time and energy. Pankaj Topiwala: 46:32 Certainly my company for example, can't afford to you know, just twiddle thumbs, create technologies for which there is absolutely no possibility of a royalty stream. So we, we cannot be in the business of developing video coding when video coding doesn't pay. So the only thing that makes money, is Applications, for example, a streaming application or some other such thing. And so Netflix and, and Google and Amazon will be streaming video and they'll charge you per stream but not on the codec. So that that's an interesting thing and it certainly affects the future development of video. It's clear to me it's a negative impact on the research that we got going in. I can't expect that Google and Amazon and Microsoft are going to continue to devote the same energy to develop future compression technologies in their royalty free environment that companies have in the open standards development technology environment. Pankaj Topiwala: 47:34 It's hard for me to believe that they will devote that much energy. They'll devote energy, but it will not be the the same level. For example, in developing a video standards such as HEVC, it took up to 10 years of development by on the order of 500 to 600 experts, well, let's say four to 500 experts from around the world meeting four times a year for 10 years. Mark Donnigan: 48:03 That is so critical. I want you to repeat that again. Pankaj Topiwala: 48:07 Well, I mean so very clearly we've been putting out a video codec roughly on the schedule of once every 10 years. MPEG-2 was 1994. AVC was 2003 and also 2004. And then HEVC in 2013. Those were roughly 10 years apart. But VVC we've accelerated the schedule to put one out in seven years instead of 10 years. But even then you should realize that we had been working right since HEVC was done. Pankaj Topiwala: 48:39 We've been working all this time to develop VVC and so on the order of 500 experts from around the world have met four times a year at all international locations, spending on the order of $100 million per meeting. You know so billions of dollars have been spent by industry to create these standards, many billions and it can't happen, you know without that. It's hard for me to believe that companies like Microsoft, Google, and whatnot, are going to devote billions to develop their next incremental, you know, AV1and AV2 AV3's. But maybe they will it just, that there's no royalty stream coming from the codec itself, only the application. Then the incentive, suppose they start dominating to create even better technology will not be there. So there really is a, a financial issue in this and that's at play right now. Dror Gill: 49:36 Yeah, I, I find it really fascinating. And of course, Mark and I are not lawyers, but all this you know, royalty free versus committee developed open source versus a standard those large companies who some people fear, you know, their dominance and not only in video codec development, but in many other areas. You know, versus you know, dozens of companies and hundreds of engineers working for seven or 10 years in a codec. So you know, it's really different approaches different methods of development eventually to approach the exact same problem of video compression. And, and how this turns out. I mean we, we cannot forecast for sure, but it will be very interesting, especially next year in 2020 when VVC is ratified. And at around the same time, EVC is ratified another codec from the MPEG committee. Dror Gill: 50:43 And then AV1, and once you know, AV1 starts hitting the market. We'll hear all the discussions of AV2. So it's gonna be really interesting and fascinating to follow. And we, we promise to to bring you all the updates here on The Video Insiders. So Pankaj I really want to thank you. This has been a fascinating discussion with very interesting insights into the world of codec development and compression and, and wavelets and DCT and and all of those topics and, and the history and the future. So thank you very much for joining us today on the video insiders. Pankaj Topiwala: 51:25 It's been my pleasure, Mark and Dror. And I look forward to interacting in the future. Hope this is a useful for your audience. If I can give you a one parting thought, let me give this... Pankaj Topiwala: 51:40 H.264 AVC was developed in 2003 and also 2004. That is you know, some 17 years or 16 years ago, it is close to being now nearly royalty-free itself. And if you look at the market share of video codecs currently being used in the market, for example, even in streaming AVC dominates that market completely. Even though VP8 and VP9 and VP10 were introduced and now AV1, none of those have any sizeable market share. AVC currently dominates from 70 to 80% of that marketplace right now. And it fully dominates broadcast where those other codecs are not even in play. And so they're 17, 16, 17 years later, it is now still the dominant codec even much over HEVC, which by the way is also taking an uptick in the last several years. So the standardized codecs developed by ITU and MPEG are not dead. They may just take a little longer to emerge as dominant forces. Mark Donnigan: 52:51 That's a great parting thought. Thanks for sharing that. What an engaging episode Dror. Yeah. Yeah. Really interesting. I learned so much. I got a DCT primer. I mean, that in and of itself was a amazing, Dror Gill: 53:08 Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Mark Donnigan: 53:11 Yeah, amazing Pankaj. Okay, well good. Well thanks again for listening to the video insiders, and as always, if you would like to come on this show, we would love to have you just send us an email. The email address is thevideoinsiders@beamr.com, and Dror or myself will follow up with you and we'd love to hear what you're doing. We're always interested in talking to video experts who are involved in really every area of video distribution. So it's not only encoding and not only codecs, whatever you're doing, tell us about it. And until next time what do we say Dror? Happy encoding! Thanks everyone.
Episode 149 of the John1911 Podcast. Freeze is out on FMLA. Here's to hoping everyone gets better soon in his household. So Danny gives his second time ever doing a podcast a whirl. Was Jeffery Epstein Murdered? ETS mags for VP9 are terrible. Making burn barrels the old world way: Shooting them. And the strange European bolt head that almost derailed a custom gun project. Marky & Danny www.John1911.com "Shooting Guns & Having Fun"
Episode 147 of the John1911 Podcast: Gemtech Integra Break-in Issues. The NEOMAG. The HK Wing Guy. Clear 17rd HK Magazines. The Anderson burn-down impresses. A $5000 truck gun. Sincerely, Marky & Freeze www.John1911.com "Shooting Guns & Having Fun"
Episode 142 of the John1911 Podcast EP142 Silencerco Harvester 30 has arrived. Custom Blaser Tactical 2 barrels? The "poop" newsletter. ATF says AA-12 shotguns too easily convertible. Hopefully GRS will loan us a Ragnarok chassis. Update on VP custom grip project. Marky & Freeze www.John1911.com "Shooting Guns & Having Fun"
Video-kodeken AV1 / VP9 har länge marknadsförts att vara fria från licenskostnader men nu har företaget Sisvel skapat en patentpool för AV1 och både VP9. Vad kommer detta få för konsekvenser för branschen? Det och några korta branschnyheter behandlar vi i detta avsnitt. Medverkande: Jonas Rydholm Birmé och Magnus Svensson från Eyevinn Technology och skribent och frilanskonsulten Jan Ozer Producent: Jonas Rydholm Birmé, Eyevinn Technology
Open source codec pioneer, Tom Vaughan, talks about the advantages & disadvantages of proprietary & open source technology. What he says may surprise you – despite which side of the fence you are on. The following blog post first appeared on the Beamr blog at: https://blog.beamr.com/2019/01/24/in-the-battle-between-open-source-proprietary-technology-does-video-win-podcast/ Video engineers dedicated to engineering encoding technologies are highly skilled and hyper-focused on developing the foundation for future online media content. Such a limited pool of experts in this field creates a lot of opportunity for growth and development, it also means there must be a level of camaraderie and cooperation between different methodologies. In past episodes, you've seen The Video Insiders compare codecs head-to-head and debate over their strengths and weaknesses. Today, they are tackling a deeper debate between encoding experts: the advantages and disadvantages of proprietary technology vs. community-driven open source. In Episode 05, Tom Vaughan surprises The Video Insiders as he talks through his take on open source vs. proprietary technology. Press play to hear a snippet from Episode 05, or click here for the full episode. Want to join the conversation? Reach out to TheVideoInsiders@beamr.com TRANSCRIPTION (lightly edited to improve readability only) Mark Donnigan: 00:00 In this episode, we talk with a video pioneer who drove a popular open source codec project before joining a commercial codec company. Trust me, you want to hear what he told us about proprietary technology, open source, IP licensing, and royalties. Announcer: 00:18 The Video Insiders is the show that makes sense of all that is happening in the world of online video, as seen through the eyes of a second generation codec nerd and a marketing guy who knows what iframes and macroblocks are. Here are your hosts, Mark Donnigan and Dror Gill. Mark Donnigan: 00:35 Okay. Mark Donnigan: 00:35 Well, welcome back everyone to this very special edition. Every edition is special, isn't it, Dror? Dror Gill: 00:43 That's right. Especially the first editions where everybody's so excited to see what's going to happen and how it would evolve. Mark Donnigan: 00:49 You know what's amazing, Dror, we had in the first 48 hours, more than 180 download. Dror Gill: 00:55 Wow. Mark Donnigan: 00:56 You know, we're like encoding geeks. I mean, are there even 180 of us in the world? Dror Gill: 01:01 I don't know. I think you should count the number of people who come to Ben Wagoner's compressionist breakfast at NAB, that's about the whole industry, right? Mark Donnigan: 01:09 Yeah. That's the whole industry. Mark Donnigan: 01:11 Hey, we want to thank, seriously in all seriousness, all the listeners who have been supporting us and we just really appreciate it. We have an amazing guest lined up for today. This is a little personal for me. It was IBC 2017, I had said something about a product that he was representing, driving, developing at the time. In fact, it was factually true. He didn't like it so much and we exchanged some words. Here's the ironic thing, this guy now works for us. Isn't that amazing, Dror? Click to view x265 vs. Beamr 5 speed and performance test. Dror Gill: 01:49 Yeah, isn't that amazing? Mark Donnigan: 01:52 You know what, and we love each other. The story ended well, talk about a good Hollywood ending. Mark Donnigan: 01:58 Well, we are talking today with Tom Vaughn. I'm going to let you introduce yourself. Tell the listeners about yourself. Tom Vaughn: 02:10 Hey Mark, hey Dror. Good to be here. Tom Vaughn: 02:12 As Mark mentioned, I'm Beamr's VP of strategy. Joined Beamr in January this year. Before that I was Beamr's, probably, primary competitor, the person who started and led the x265 project at MulticoreWare. We were fierce competitors, but we were always friendly and always friends. Got to know the Beamr team when Beamr first brought their image compression science from the photo industry to the video industry, which was three or four years ago. Really enjoyed collaborating with them and brainstorming and working with them, and we've always been allies in the fight to make new formats successful and deal with some of the structural issues in the industry. Dror Gill: 03:02 Let me translate. New formats, that means HEVC. Structural issues, that means patent royalties. Tom Vaughn: 03:08 Yes. Dror Gill: 03:09 Okay, you can continue. Tom Vaughn: 03:11 No need to be subtle here. Tom Vaughn: 03:13 Yeah, we had many discussions over the years about how to deal with the challenging macro environment in the codec space. I decided to join the winning team at Beamr this year, and it's been fantastic. Mark Donnigan: 03:28 Well, we're so happy to have you aboard, Tom. Mark Donnigan: 03:32 I'd like to just really jump in. You have a lot of expertise in the area of open source, and in the industry, there's a lot of discussion and debate, and some would even say there's religion, around open source versus proprietary technology, but you've been on both sides and I'd really like to jump into the conversation and have you give us a real quick primer as to what is open source. Tom Vaughn: 04:01 Well, open source is kind of basic what it says is that you can get the full source code to that software. Now, there isn't just one flavor of open source in terms of the software license that you get, there are many different open source licenses. Some have more restrictions and some have less restrictions on what you can do. There are some well known open source software programs and platforms, Linux is probably the most well known in the multimedia space, there's FFmpeg and Libav. There's VLC, the multimedia player. In the codec space, x264, x265, VP9, AV1, et cetera. Dror Gill: 04:50 I think the main attraction of open source, I think, the main feature is that people from all over the world join together, collaborate, each one contributes their own piece, then somehow this is managed together. Every bug that is discovered, anyone can fix it, because the source is open. This creates kind of a community and together a piece of software is created that is much larger and more robust than anything that a single developer could do on his own. Tom Vaughn: 05:23 Yeah, ideally the fact that the source code is open means that you have many sets of eyes, not only trying the program, but able to go through the source code and see exactly how it was written and therefore more code review can happen. On the collaboration side, you're looking for volunteers, and if you can find and energize many, many people worldwide to become enthusiastic and devote time or get their companies motivated to allocate developers full- or part-time to a particular open source project, you get that collaboration from many different types of people with different individual use cases and motivations. There are patches submitted from many different people, but someone has to decide, does that patch get committed or are there problems with that? Should it be changed? Tom Vaughn: 06:17 Designed by a committee isn't always the optimal, so someone or some small group has to decide what should be included, what should be left out. Dror Gill: 06:27 It's interesting to see, actually, the difference between x264 and x265 in this respect, because x264, the open source implementation of x264 was led by a group of developers, really independent developers, and no single company was owning or leading the development of that open source project. However, with x265, which is the open source implementation of HEVC, your previous company, MulticoreWare, has taken the lead and devoted, I assume, most of the development resources that have gone into the open source development, most of the contributions came from that company, but it is still an open source project. Tom Vaughn: 07:06 That's right. x264 was started by some students at a French university, and when they were graduating, leaving the university, they convinced the university to enable them to take the code with them, essentially under an open source license. It was very much grassroots open source beginnings and execution where developers may come and go, but it was a community collaboration. Tom Vaughn: 07:31 I started x265 at MulticoreWare with a couple of other individuals, and the way we started it was finding some commercial companies who expressed a strong interest in such a thing coming to life and who were early backers commercially. It was quite different. Then, because there's a small team of full-time developers on it working 40 hours plus a week, that team is moving very fast, it's organized, it's within a company. There was less of a need for a community. While we did everything we could to attract more external contributors, attracting contributors is always a challenge of open source projects. Mark Donnigan: 08:14 What I hear you saying, Tom, is it sounds like compared to the x264 project, the x265 project didn't have as large of a independent group of contributors. Is that …? Tom Vaughn: 08:29 Well, x264 was all independent contributors. Mark Donnigan: 08:32 That's right. Tom Vaughn: 08:33 And still is, essentially. There are many companies that fund x264 developers explicitly. Chip companies will fund individual developers to optimize popular open source software projects for their instruction set. AVX, AVX2, AVX512, essentially, things like that. Tom Vaughn: 08:58 HEVC is significantly more complex than AVC, and I think, if I recall correctly, x265 already has three times the number of commits than x264, even though it's only been in existence for one third of the life. Dror Gill: 09:12 So Tom, what's interesting to me is everybody's talking about open source software being almost synonymous with free software. Is open source really free? Is it the same? Tom Vaughn: 09:23 It can be at times. One part depends on the license and the other part depends on how you're using the software. For example, if it's a very open license like Apache, or BSD, or UIUC, that's an attribution only license, and you're pretty much free to create modifications, incorporate the software in your own works and distribute the resulting system. Tom Vaughn: 09:49 Software programs like x264 and x265 are licensed under the GNU GPL V2, that is an open source license that has a copyleft requirement. That means if you incorporate that in a larger work and distribute that larger work, you have to open source not only your modifications, but you have to open source the larger work. Most commercial companies don't want to incorporate some open source software in their commercial product, and then have to open source the commercial product. The owners of the copyright of the GPL V2 code, x264 LLC or MulticoreWare, also offer a commercial license, meaning you get access to that software, not under the GNU GPL V2, but under a separate, different license, in which case for you, it's not open source anymore. Your commercial license dictates what you can and can't do. Generally that commercial license doesn't include the copyleft requirement, so you can incorporate it in some commercial product and distribute that commercial product without open sourcing your commercial product. Dror Gill: 10:54 Then you're actually licensing that software as you would license it from a commercial company. Tom Vaughn: 10:59 Exactly. In that case it's not open source at all, it's a commercial license. Dror Gill: 11:04 It's interesting what you said about the GPL, the fact that anything that you compile with it, create derivatives of, incorporate into your software, you need to open source those components that you integrate with as well. I think this is what triggered Steve Ballmer to say in 2001, he said something like, “Open source is a cancer that spreads throughout your company and eats your IP.” That was very interesting. I think he meant mostly GPL because of that requirement, but the interesting thing is that he said that in 2001, and in 2016 in an interview, he said, “I was wrong and I really love Linux.” Today Microsoft itself open sources a lot of its own development. Mark Donnigan: 11:48 That's right. Yeah, that's right. Mark Donnigan: 11:50 Well Tom, let's … This has been an awesome discussion. Let's bring it to a conclusion. When is proprietary technology the right choice and when is open source maybe the correct choice? Can you give the listeners some guidelines? Tom Vaughn: 12:08 Sure, people are trying to solve problems. Engineers, companies are trying to build products and services, and they have to compete in their own business environment. Let's say you're a video service and you run a video business. The quality of that video and the efficiency that you can deliver that video matters a lot. We know what those advantages of open source are, and all things being equal, people gravitate towards open source a lot because engineers feel comfortable actually seeing the source code, being able to read through it, find bugs themselves if pushed to the limit. Tom Vaughn: 12:45 At the end of the day, if an open source project can't produce the winning implementation of something, you shouldn't necessarily use it just because it's open source. At the end of the day you have a business to run and what you want is the most performant libraries and platforms to build your business around. If you find that a proprietary implementation in the long run is more cost effective, more efficient, higher performance, and the company that is behind that proprietary implementation is solid and is going to be there for you and provide a contractual commitment to support you, there's no reason to not choose some proprietary code to incorporate into your product or service. Tom Vaughn: 13:32 When we're talking about codecs, there are particular qualities I'm looking for, performance, how fast does it run? How efficiently does it utilize compute resources? How many cores do I need in my server to run this in real time? And compression efficiency, what kind of video quality can I get at a given bit rate under a given set of conditions? I don't want the second best implementation, I want the best implementation of that standard, because at scale, I can save a lot of money if I have a more efficient implementation of that standard. Mark Donnigan: 14:01 Those are excellent pointers. It just really comes back to we're solving problems, right? It's easy to get sucked into religious debates about some of these things, but at the end of the day we all have an obligation to do what's right and what's best for our companies, which includes selecting the best technology, what is going to do the best job at solving the problems. Mark Donnigan: 14:24 Thank you again for joining us. Tom Vaughn: 14:25 My pleasure, thank you. Dror Gill: 14:26 I would also like to thank you for joining us, not only joining us on this podcast, but also joining Beamr. Mark Donnigan: 14:32 Absolutely. Mark Donnigan: 14:33 Well, we want to thank you the listener for, again, joining The Video Insiders. We hope you will subscribe. You can go to thevideoinsiders.com and you can stream from your browser, you can subscribe on iTunes. We're on Spotify. We are on Google Play. We're expanding every day. Announcer: 14:57 Thank you for listening to The Video Insiders podcast, a production of Beamr Limited. To begin using Beamr's codecs today, go to Beamr.com/free to receive up to 100 hours of no-cost HEVC and H.264 transcoding every month.
E04: In this episode, The Video Insider's catch up with industry expert, Tim Siglin, to discuss HEVC implementation trends that counter previous assumptions, notable 2018 streaming events, and what's coming in 2019. The following blog post first appeared on the Beamr blog at: https://blog.beamr.com/2019/01/01/2018-the-year-hevc-took-flight/ By now, most of us have seen the data and know that online video consumption is soaring at a rate that is historically unrivaled. It's no surprise that in the crux of the streaming era, so many companies are looking to innovate and figure out how to make their workflows or customers workflows better, less expensive, and faster. In Episode 4 of The Video Insiders, we caught up with streaming veteran Tim Siglin to discuss HEVC implementation trends that counter previous assumptions, notable 2018 streaming events, and what's coming in 2019. Tune in to hear The Video Insiders cover top-of-mind topics: HEVC for lower resolutions Streaming the World Cup Moving from digital broadcast to IP-based infrastructure What consumers aren't thinking about when it comes to 4K and HDR Looking forward into 2019 & beyond Tune in to Episode 04: 2018, the Year HEVC Took Flight or watch the video below. Want to join the conversation? Reach out to TheVideoInsiders@beamr.com TRANSCRIPTION (lightly edited to improve readability only) Mark Donnigan: 00:00 On today's episode, the Video Insiders sit down with an industry luminary who shares results of a codec implementation study, while discussing notable streaming events that took place in 2018 and what's on the horizon for 2019. Stay tuned. You don't want to miss receiving the inside scoop on all this and more. Announcer: 00:22 The Video Insiders is the show that makes sense of all that is happening in the world of online video, as seen through the eyes of a second generation Kodak nerd and a marketing guy who knows what I frames and macroblocks are. Here are your hosts, Mark Donnigan and Dror Gill. Mark Donnigan: 00:40 Welcome, everyone. I am Mark Donnigan, and I want to say how honored Dror and I are to have you with us. Before I introduce this very special guest and episode, I want to give a shout of thanks for all of the support that we're receiving. It's really been amazing. Dror Gill: 00:58 Yeah. Yeah, it's been awesome. Mark Donnigan: 00:59 In the first 48 hours, we received 180 downloads. It's pretty amazing. Dror Gill: 01:06 Yeah. Yeah, it is. The industry is not that large, and I think it's really an amazing number that they're already listening to the show from the start before the word of mouth starts coming out, and people spread the news and things like that. We really appreciate it. So, if it's you that is listening, thank you very much. Mark Donnigan: 01:29 We really do aim for this to be an agenda-free zone. I guess we can put it that way. Obviously, this show is sponsored by Beamr, and we have a certain point of view on things, but the point is, we observed there wasn't a good place to find out what's going on in the industry and sort of get unbiased, or maybe it's better to say unfiltered, information. That's what we aim to do in every episode. Mark Donnigan: 01:57 In this one, we're going to do just that. We have someone who you can definitely trust to know what's really happening in the streaming video space, and I know he has some juicy insights to share with us. So, without further ado, let's bring on Tim Siglin. Tim Siglin: 02:15 Hey, guys. Thank you for having me today and I will definitely try to be either as unfiltered or unbiased as possible. Mark Donnigan: 02:21 Why don't you give us a highlight reel, so to speak, of what you've done in the industry and, even more specifically, what are you working on today? Tim Siglin: 02:31 Sure. I have been in streaming now for a little over 20 years. In fact, when Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen came on as the editor at StreamingMedia.com, he said, “You seemed to be one of the few people who were there in the early days.” It's true. I actually had the honor of writing the 10-year anniversary of Streaming Media articles for the magazine, and then did the 20-year last year. Tim Siglin: 02:57 My background was Motion Picture production and then I got into video conferencing. As part of video conferencing, we were trying to figure out how to include hundreds of people in a video conference, but not need necessarily have them have two-way feedback. That's where streaming sort of caught my eye, because, ultimately, for video conferencing we maybe needed 10 subject matter experts who would talk back and forth, and together a hundred, then it went to thousands, and now hundreds of thousands. You can listen in and use something like chat or polling to provide feedback. Tim Siglin: 03:31 For me, the industry went from the early revolutionary days of “Hey, let's change everything. Let's get rid of TV. Let's do broadcast across IP.” That was the mantra in the early days. Now, of course, where we are is sort of, I would say, two-thirds of the way there, and we can talk a little bit about that later. The reality is that the old mediums are actually morphing to allow themselves to do heap, which is good, to compete with over the top. Tim Siglin: 04:01 Ultimately, what I think we'll find, especially when we get to pure IP broadcast with ATSC 3.0 and some other things for over-the-air, is that we will have more mediums to consume on rather than fewer. I remember the early format ways and of course we're going to talk some in this episode about some of the newer codec like HEVC. Ultimately, it seems like the industry goes through the cycles of player wars, format wars, browser wars, operating system wars, and we hit brief periods of stability which we've done with AVC or H.264 over the last probably eight years. Tim Siglin: 04:46 Then somebody wants to stir the pot, figure out how to either do it better, less expensively, faster. We go back into a cycle of trying to decide what the next big thing will be. In terms of what I'm working on now, because I've been in the industry for almost 21 years. Last year, I helped start a not-for-profit called Help Me Stream, which focuses on working with NGOs in emerging economies, trying to help them actually get into the streaming game to get their critical messages out. Tim Siglin: 05:18 That might be emerging economies like African economies, South America, and just the idea that we in the first world have streaming down cold, but there are a lot of messages that need to get out in emerging economies and emerging markets that they don't necessarily have the expertise to do. My work is to tie experts here with need there and figure out which technologies and services would be the most appropriate and most cost effective. Mark Donnigan: 05:46 That's fascinating, Tim. Tim Siglin: 05:48 The other thing I'm working on here, just briefly, is we're getting ready for the Streaming Media Sourcebook, the 2019 sourcebook. I'm having to step back for the next 15 days, take a really wide look at the industry and figure out what the state of affairs are. Dror Gill: 06:06 That's wonderful. I think because this is exactly the right point, is one you end and the other one begins, kind of to summarize where we've been in 2018, what is the state of the industry and the fact that you're doing that for the sourcebook, I think, ties in very nicely with our desire to hear from you an overview of what were the major milestones or advancements that were made in the streaming industry in 2018, and then looking into next year. Dror Gill: 06:39 Obviously, the move to IP, getting stronger and stronger, now the third phase after analog and digital, now we have broadcast over IP. It's interesting what you said about broadcasters not giving up the first with the pure OTT content providers. They have a huge business. They need to keep their subscribers and lower their churn and keep people from cutting the cord, so to speak. Dror Gill: 07:04 The telcos and the cable companies still need to provide the infrastructure for Internet on top of which the over-the-top providers and their content, but they still need to have more offering and television and VLD content in order to keep their subscribers. It's very interesting to hear how they're doing it and how they are upgrading themselves to the era of IP. Tim Siglin: 07:30 I think, Dror, you hit a really major point, which is we, the heavy lift … I just finished an article in ATSC 3.0 where I talk about using 2019 to prepare for 2020 when that will go live in the U.S. The heavy lift was the analog to digital conversion. The slightly easier lift is the conversion from digital to IP, but it still requires significant infrastructure upgrade and even transmission equipment to be able to do it correctly for the over-the-year broadcasters and cable. Dror Gill: 08:07 That's right. I think on the other hand, there is one big advantage to broadcast, even broadcast over-the-air. That is the ability to actually broadcast, the ability to reach millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people over a single channel that everybody is receiving. Whereas, because of historic reasons and legacy reasons in IP, we are limited, still, when you broadcast to the end user to doing everything over unicast. When you do this, it creates a tremendous load on your network. You need to manage your CDNs. Dror Gill: 08:46 I think we've witnessed in 2018 on one hand very large events being streamed to our record audience. But, on the other hand, some of them really failed in terms of user experience. It wasn't what they expected because of the high volume of users, and because more and more people have discovered the ability to stream things over IP to their televisions and mobile devices. Can you share with us some of the experience that you have, some of the things that you're hearing about in terms of these big events where they had failures and what were the reasons for those failures? Tim Siglin: 09:30 I want to reiterate the point you made on the OTA broadcast. It's almost as if you have read the advanced copy of my article, which I know you haven't because it's only gone to the editor. Dror Gill: 09:42 I don't have any inside information. I have to say, even though we are the Video Insiders. Mark Donnigan: 09:47 We are the Video Insiders. That's right. Dror Gill: 09:49 We are the Video Insiders, but … Mark Donnigan: 09:49 But no inside information here. Dror Gill: 09:51 No inside information. I did not steal that copy. Tim Siglin: 09:55 What I point out in that article, Dror, I think which will come out in January shortly after CES is basically this. We have done a good job in the streaming industry, the OTT space of pushing the traditional mediums to upgrade themselves. One of the things as you say with OTA, that ability to do essentially a multicast from a tower wirelessly is a really, really good thing, because to get us to scale, and I think about things like the World Cup, the Olympics and even the presidential funeral that's happened here in December, there are large-scale events that we in the OTT space just can't handle, if you're talking about having to build the capacity. Tim Siglin: 10:39 The irony is, one good ATSC transmission tower could hit as many people as we could handle essentially globally with the unicast (OTT) model. If you look at things like that and then you look at things like EMBMS in the mobile world, where there is that attempt to do essentially a multicast, and it goes to points like the World Cup. I think one of the horror stories in the World Cup was in Australia. There was a mobile provider named Optus who won the rights to actually do half of the World Cup preliminary games. In the first several days, they were so overwhelmed by the number of users who wanted to watch and were watching, as you say, in a unicast model that they ended up having to go back to the company they had bid against who had the other half of the preliminaries and ask them to carry those on traditional television. Tim Siglin: 11:41 The CEO admitted that it was such a spectacular failure that it damaged the brand of the mobile provider. Instead of the name Optus being used, everybody was referring to it as “Floptus.” You don't want your brand being known as the butt of jokes for an event that only happens once every four years that you have a number of devotees in your market. And heaven forbid, it had been the World Cup for cricket, there would have been riots in the street in Sydney and Melbourne. Thank goodness it was Australia with soccer as opposed to Australia with cricket. Tim Siglin: 12:18 It brings home the point that we talk about scale, but it's really hard to get to scale in a unicast environment. The other event, this one happened, I believe, in late 2017, was the Mayweather fight that was a large pay-per-view event that was streamed. It turned out the problem there wasn't as much the streams as it was the authentication servers were overwhelmed in the first five minutes of the fight. So, with authentication gone, it took down the ability to actually watch the stream. Tim Siglin: 12:53 For us, it's not just about the video portion of it, it's actually about the total ecosystem and who you're delivering to, whether you're going to force caps into place because you know you can't go beyond a certain capacity, or whether you're going to have to partner up with traditional media like cable service providers or over-the-air broadcasters. Mark Donnigan: 13:14 It's a really good point, Tim. In the World Cup, the coverage that I saw, it was more of, I'd almost say or use the phrase, dashed expectations. Consumers, they were able to watch it. In most cases, I think it played smoothly. In other words, the video was there, but HDR signaling didn't work or didn't work right. Then it looked odd on some televisions or … Tim Siglin: 13:40 In high frame rate … Tim Siglin: 13:43 20 frames a second instead of 60 frames a second. Mark Donnigan: 13:48 Exactly. What's interesting to me is that, what I see is, the consumer, they're not of course walking around thinking as we are, like frame rate and color space and resolution. They are getting increasingly sensitive to where they can look at video now and say, “That's good video,” or “That doesn't look right to me.” I know we were talking before we started recording about this latest Tom Cruise public service announcement, which is just super fascinating, because it … Tim Siglin: 14:24 To hear him say motion interpolation. Mark Donnigan: 14:26 Yeah. Maybe we should tell the audience, for those, since it literally just came out I think today, even. But you want to tell the audience what Tom Cruise is saying? Tim Siglin: 14:38 Essentially, Tom Cruise was on the set of Top Gun, as they're shooting Top Gun. Another gentleman did a brief PSA for about a minute asking people to turn off motion interpolation on their televisions, which motion interpolation essentially takes a 24-frame per second and converts it to 30 frames per second by adding phantom frames in the middle. Because Mission Impossible: Fallout is just being released for streaming, Cruise was concerned and obviously others were concerned that some of the scenes would not look nearly as good with motion interpolation turned on. Tim Siglin: 15:17 I think, Mark, we ought to go to a PSA model, asking for very particular things like, “How do you turn HDR on? How do you …” Those types of things, because those get attention in a way that you and I or a video engineer can't get that attention. Dror Gill: 15:33 How do you know if what you're getting is actually 4K or interpolate HD, for example? Tim Siglin: 15:38 Especially in our part of the industry, because we will call something OTT 4K streaming. That may mean that it fits in a 4K frame, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's that number of pixels being delivered. Dror Gill: 15:52 It can also mean that the top layer in your adaptive bit rate stream is 4K, but then if you don't have enough bandwidth, you're actually getting the HD layer or even lower. Tim Siglin: 16:01 Exactly. Dror Gill: 16:02 Even though it is a 4K broadcast and it is 4K content. Sometimes, you can be disappointed by that fact as well. Mark Donnigan: 16:11 I have to give a very, very funny story directly related, and this happened probably, I don't know, maybe, at least 18 months ago, maybe two years ago. I'm sitting on an airplane next to this guy. It's the usual five-minute, get acquainted before we both turn on our computers. Anyway, when someone asks, “What do you do?” I generally just say, “I work for a video software company,” because how do you explain digital encoding? Most people just sort of stop at that, and don't really ask more. Mark Donnigan: 16:44 But this guy is like, “Oh, really?” He said, “So, I just bought a 4K TV and I love it.” He was raving about his new Samsung TV. Of course, he figured I'm a video guy. I would appreciate that. I said, “Hey.” “So, you must subscribe to Netflix.” “Yes. Yes, of course,” he says. I said, “What do you think of the Netflix quality? It looks great, doesn't it?” Mark Donnigan: 17:10 He sort of hem and hawed. He's like, “Well, it really … I mean, yeah. Yeah, it looks great, but it's not quite … I'm just not sure.” Then, I said, “I'm going to ask you two questions. First of all, are you subscribed to the 4K plan?” He was. Then I said, “How fast is your Internet at home.” He's like, “I just have the minimum. I don't know. I think it's the 20 megabit package,” or whatever it was. I don't remember the numbers. Mark Donnigan: 17:38 I said, “There's this thing.” And I gave him like a 30-second primer on adaptive bit rate, and I said, “It is possible, I have no idea of your situation, that you might be watching the HD version.” Anyway, he's like, “Hah, that's interesting.” I connect with the guy on LinkedIn. Three days later, I get this message. He says, “I just upgraded my Internet. I now have 4K on my TV. It looks awesome.” Mark Donnigan: 18:04 On one hand, the whole situation was not surprising and, yet, how many thousands, tens of thousands, maybe millions of people are in the exact same boat? They've got this beautiful TV. It could be because they're running some low-end router in the house. It could be they truly have a low end bandwidth package. There could be a lot of reasons why they're not getting the bandwidth. They're so excited about their 4K TV. They're paying Netflix to get the top layer, the best quality, and they're not even seeing it. It's such a pity. Tim Siglin: 18:37 I had a TSA agent asked me that same question, Mark, when I came through customs. I'm like, “Sure. I'll stand here and answer that question for you.” The router was actually what I suggested that he upgrade, because he said his router was like this (old unit). Mark Donnigan: 18:53 In a lot of homes, it's a router that's 15 years old and it just isn't (up to the task). Tim Siglin: 18:58 But it brings out the point that even as we're talking about newer codecs and better quality, even if we get a lower sweet spot in terms of 4K content (streaming bandwidth), or as we found in the survey that we worked on together, that using HEVC for 1080p or 720p, if the routers, if the software in the chain is not updated, the delivery quality will suffer in a way that people who have a tuned television and seen the consistent quality aren't certain what to do to fix when they use an over-the-top service. Tim Siglin: 19:34 I think this is a key for 2019. As we prepare for ATSC 3.0 on over-the-air broadcast where people will be able to see pristine 4K, it will actually force those of us in the OTT space to up our game to make sure that we're figuring out how to deliver across these multiple steps in a process that we don't break. Dror Gill: 19:54 You really see ATSC 3.0 as a game-changer in 2019? Tim Siglin: 19:59 What I see it as is the response from the broadcast industry to, A) say that they're still relevant, which I think is a good political move. And, B) it provides the scale you were talking about, Dror. See, I think what it does is it at least puts us in the OTT space on notice that there will be in certain first world countries a really decent quality delivery free of charge with commercials over the air. Tim Siglin: 20:31 It takes me back to the early days of video compression when, if you had a good class-one engineer and an analog NTSC transmission system, they could give you really good quality if your TV was tuned correctly. It only meant having to tune your TV. It didn't mean having to tune your router or having to tune your cable modem, having to tune your settings on your TV. I think that's where the game-changer may be, is that those tuner cards, which will send HDR signaling and things like that with the actual transmission, are going to make it much easier for the consumer to consume quality in a free scenario. I think that part of it is a potential game-changer. Mark Donnigan: 21:19 That's interesting. Tim, we worked together earlier this year on a survey, an industry survey that I think it would be really, really interesting to listeners to talk about. Shall we pivot into that? Maybe you can share some of the findings there. Tim Siglin: 21:38 Why don't you take the lead on why Beamr wanted to do that? Then I'll follow up with some of the points that we got out of it. Mark Donnigan: 21:46 Obviously, we are a codec developer. It's important for us to always be addressing the market the way that the market wants to be addressed, meaning that we're developing technologies and solutions and standards that's going to be adopted. Clearly, there has been, especially if we rewind a year ago or even 18 months ago, AV1 was just recently launched. There were still questions about VP9. Mark Donnigan: 22:19 Obviously, H264 AVC is the standard, used everywhere. We felt, “Let's go out to the industry. Let's really find out what the attitudes are, what the thinking is, what's going on ‘behind closed doors' and find out what are people doing.” Are they building workflows for these new advanced codecs? How are they going to build those workflows? That was the impetus, if you will, for it. Mark Donnigan: 22:49 We are very happy, Tim, to work with you on that and of course Streaming Media assisted us with promoting it. That was the reason we did it. I know there were some findings that were pretty predictable, shall we say, no surprises, but there were some things that I think were maybe a little more surprising. So, maybe if you like to share some of those. Tim Siglin: 23:12 Yeah. I'll hit the highlights on that. Let me say too that one of the things that I really like about this particular survey, there was another survey that had gone on right around that time that essentially was, “Are you going to adopt HEVC?” What we took the approach on with this survey was to say, “Okay. Those of you who've already adopted HEVC, what are the lessons that we can learn from that?” Tim Siglin: 23:36 We didn't exclude those who were looking at AV1 or some of the other codes, even VP9, but we wanted to know those people who used HEVC. Were they using it in pilot projects? Were they thinking about it? Were they using it in actual production? What we found in the survey is that AVC, or H.264, was still clearly dominant in the industry, but that the ramp-up to HEVC was moving along much faster than at least I … I believed. Mark, I told you when we started the survey question creation, which was about a year ago and then launched it in early 2018, I expected we wouldn't see a whole lot of people using HEVC in production. Tim Siglin: 24:23 I was pleasantly surprised to say that I was wrong. In fact, I think you mentioned in our recent Streaming Media West interview that there was a statistic you gave about the number of households that could consume HEVC. Was it north of 50%? Mark Donnigan: 24:40 Yeah, it's more than 50%. What's interesting about that number is that that actually came from a very large MSO. Of course, they have a very good understanding of what devices are on their network. They found that there was at least one device in at least 50% of their homes that could receive and decode, playback, HEVC. That's about as real world as you can get. Tim Siglin: 25:06 What was fascinating to me too in this study was, we asked open-ended questions, which is what I've done in the research projects for the last 25 years both the video conferencing and streaming. One of the questions we asked was, “Do you see HEVC as only a 4K solution or do you see it as an option for lower resolutions?” It turned out overwhelmingly, people said, “We not only see it for 4K. We see it for high-frame rate (HFR) 1080p, standard frame rate 1080p, with some HDR.” Tim Siglin: 25:40 Not a majority, but a large number of respondents said they would even see it as a benefit at 720p. What that tells me is, because we had a large number of engineers, video engineers, and we also have people in business development who answer these questions, what it tells me is that companies know as we scale because of the unicast problem that Dror pointed out in the beginning that scaling with a codec that consumes more bandwidth is a good way to lose money, kind of like the joke that the way a rich man can lose money really fast is to invest in an airline. Tim Siglin: 26:19 If indeed you get scale with AVC, you could find yourself with a really large bill. That look at HEVC is being not just for 4K, HDR, or high frame rate in the future, but also for 1080p with some HDR and high frame rate. It tells me that the codec itself or the promise of the codec itself was actually really good. What was even more fascinating to me was the number of companies that had AVC pipelines that were actually looking to integrate HEVC into those same production pipe. Tim Siglin: 26:55 It was much easier from a process standpoint to integrate HEVC into an AVC pipeline, so in other words, H265 into H264 pipeline than it was to go out of house and look at something like AV1 or VP9, because the work that was done on HEVC builds on the benefits that were already in place in AVC. Of course, you got Apple who has HLS, HTTP Live Streaming, and a huge ecosystem in terms of iPhones and iPads, laptops and desktops supporting HEVC not just as a standard for video delivery, but also with the HEIC or HEIF image format, now having all of their devices shoot images using HEVC instead of JPEG. That in and of itself drives forward adoption of HEVC. I think you told me since that survey came out, probably now seven months ago, you all have continued to see the model of all-in HEVC adoption. Dror Gill: 28:03 This is what we promote all the time. It's kind of a movement. Are you all in HEVC or are you doing it just for 4K, just where you have to do it? We really believe in all-in HEVC. Actually, this week, I had an interesting discussion with one of our customers who is using our optimization product for VOD content, to reduce bit-rate of H.264 (streams). He said, “I want to have a product. I want to have a solution for reducing bit-rates on our live channels.” Dror Gill: 28:32 So, I asked them, “Okay. Why don't you just switch your codec to HEVC?” He said, “No, I can't do that.” I said, “Why not?” He said, “You know compatibility and things like that.” I asked, “Okay. What are you using? What are you delivering to?” He said, “We have our own set-top boxes (STB), IP set-top boxes which we give out to our customers. Well, these are pretty new.” So, they support HEVC. I'm okay there. “Then we have an Apple TV app.” “Okay, Apple TV has a 4K version. So, it supports HEVC. All of the latest Apple TV devices have HEVC. That's fine.” “Then we have smartphone apps, smart TV apps for Android TV and for the LG platform.” Dror Gill: 29:15 Obviously, TV's support 4K. So, I'm okay there. With delivering to mobile devices, all the high-end devices already support HEVC. He was making this estimate that around 50 to 60% of his viewers are using devices that are HEVC capable. Suddenly, he's thinking, “Yeah, I can do that. I can go all in HEVC. I will continue, of course, to support H.264 for all of the devices that don't support HEVC. But if I can save 50% of the bandwidth to 50 to 60% of my customers, that's a very big savings.” Mark Donnigan: 29:48 What's interesting about this conversation, Dror, is first of all I'm pretty certain that the operator you're talking with is different than the operator that I shared, found the exact same thing. This is a consistent theme, is that pretty much in developed parts of the world, it really is true that 50% or more of the users can today receive HEVC. This number is only growing. It's not like it's static It is just growing. Next year, I don't know if that number will be 60% or 70%, but it's going to be even bigger. Mark Donnigan: 30:27 What's fascinating is that, again, we've said earlier, that the consumer is getting just more aware of quality, and they're getting more aware of when they're being underserved. For operators who are serving to lowest common denominator, which is to say, AVC works across all my devices, and it's true. AVC works on all the high-end devices equally well, but you're under-serving a large and growing number of your users. Mark Donnigan: 31:01 If your competitors are doing the same, then I guess you could say … well, “Who are they going to switch to?” But there are some fast-moving leaders in the space who are either planning or they're shortly going to be offering better quality. They're going to be extending HEVC into lower bit rates or lower resolutions, that is, and therefore lower bit rates, and the consumers are going to begin to see like, “Well, wait a second. This service over here that my friend has or we have another subscription in the household, how come the video looks better?” They just begin to migrate there. I think it's really important when we have these sorts of conversations to connect to this idea that don't underserve your consumer in an effort to be something to everybody. Tim Siglin: 31:57 I would add two other quick things to that, Mark. One is, we've always had this conversation in the industry about the three-legged stool of speed, quality and bandwidth in terms of the encoding. Mark Donnigan: 32:09 That's right. Tim Siglin: 32:09 Two of those are part of the consumer equation, which is quality and bandwidth. Then, oftentimes, we've had to make the decision between quality and bandwidth. If the argument is ostensibly that HEVC as it stands right now, had a couple years of optimization, can get us to about, let's say, 40%. Let's not even say 50%. For equivalent quality, it can get us to 40% bandwidth reduction. Why wouldn't you switch over to something like that? Tim Siglin: 32:39 Then the second part, and I have to put a plugin for what Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen and the Streaming Media team did at Streaming Media West by having Roger Pantos come and speak, Roger Pantos being of course the inventor of HLS, and I'm not a huge fan of HLS, just because of the latency issues. But he pointed out in his presentation, his tutorial around HLS that you can put two different codecs in a manifest file. There is absolutely no reason that an OTT provider could not provide both HEVC and AVC within the same manifest file and then allow the consumer device to choose. Tim Siglin: 33:22 When Dror mentioned the company who has the OTT boxes that they give away, they could easily set a flag in those boxes to say, “If you're presented with a manifest file that has AVC and HEVC, go with HEVC to lower the bandwidth, overall.” The beauty is it's a technical issue at this point and it's a technical implementation issue, not a ‘can we make it work?' Because we know that it works based around the HLS. Mark Donnigan: 33:54 This is excellent. Tim, let's wrap this up, as I knew it would be. It has just been an awesome conversation. Thank you for sharing all your years of collective experience to give some insight into what's happening in the industry. Let's look at 2019. I know we've been talking a little bit about … you've made references to ATSC 3.0. Some of our listeners will be going to CES. Maybe there's some things that they should be looking at or keeping their eyes opened for. What can you tell us about 2019? Tim Siglin: 34:35 Here's what I think 2019 is bringing. We have moved in the cloud computing space and you all are part of this conversation at Beamr. We've moved from having cloud-based solutions that were not at parity with on-premise solutions to actually in 2018 reaching parity between what you could do in an on-premise solution versus the cloud. Now, I think in 2019, what we're going to start seeing is a number of features in cloud-based services, whether it's machine learning, which the popular nomenclature is AI, but I really like machine learning as a much better descriptor, whether it's machine learning, whether it's real-time transcoding of live content, whether it's the ability to simultaneously spit out AVC and HEVC like we've been talking about here that the cloud-based solutions will move beyond parity with the on-premise solutions. Tim Siglin: 35:35 There always will be needs for the on-premise parts from a security standpoint in sort of the industries, but I don't think that will inhibit cloud-based in 2019. If people are going to CES, one of the things to look at there, for instance, is a big leap in power consumption savings for mobile devices. I'm not necessarily talking about smartphones, because the research I've done says the moment you turn GPS on, you lose 25% of battery. Tablets have the potential to make a resurgence in a number of areas for consumers and I think we'll see some advances in battery (capacity). Tim Siglin: 36:19 Part of that goes to HEVC, which as we know is a much harder codec to decode. I think the consumer companies are being forced into thinking about power consumption as HEVC becomes more mainstream. That's something I think people should pay attention to as well. Then, finally, HDR and surround sound solutions, especially object placement like Dolby Atmos and some of these others, will become much more mainstream as a way to sell flat panels and surround sound systems. Tim Siglin: 36:56 We sort of languished in that space. 4K prices have dropped dramatically in the last two years, but we're not yet ready for 8K. But I think we'll see a trend toward fixing some of the audio problems. In the streaming space, to fix those audio problems, we need to be able to encode and encapsulate into sort of the standard surround sound model. Those are three areas that I would suggest people pay attention. Mark Donnigan: 37:25 Well, thank you for joining us, Tim. It's really great to have you on. We'll definitely do this again. We want to thank you, the listener, for supporting the Video Insiders. Until the next episode. Happy encoding! Announcer: 37:39 Thank you for listening to the Video Insiders Podcast, a production of Beamr Imaging Limited. To begin using Beamr's codecs today, go to Beamr.com/free to receive up to 100 hours of no cost HEVC and H.264 transcoding every month.
E03: What does the future hold for video codecs? This week, The Video Insiders look at the past and present to assess the future landscape of video encoding as they discuss where AVC, VP9, and VVC fit into the codec stew. The following blog post first appeared on the Beamr blog at: https://blog.beamr.com/2018/12/15/the-future-of-3-character-codecs-avc-vp9-vvc/ Anyone familiar with the streaming video industry knows that we love our acronyms. You would be hard-pressed to have a conversation about the online video industry without bringing one up… In today's episode, The Video Insiders focus on the future of three-character codecs: AVC, VP9, and VVC. But before we can look at the future, we have to take a moment to revisit the past. The year 2018 marks the 15-year anniversary of AVC and in this episode, we visit the process and lifecycle of standardization to adoption and what that means for the future of these codecs. Want to join the conversation? Reach out to TheVideoInsiders@beamr.com. TRANSCRIPTION (lightly edited for improved readability) Mark Donnigan: 00:49 Well, Hi, Dror! Dror Gill: 00:50 Is this really episode three? Mark Donnigan: 00:52 It is, it is episode three. So, today we have a really exciting discussion as we consider the future of codecs named with three characters. Dror Gill: 01:03 Three character codecs, okay, let's see. Mark Donnigan: 01:06 Three character codecs. Dror Gill: 01:09 I can think of … Mark Donnigan: 01:09 How many can you name? Dror Gill: 01:10 Let's see, that's today's trivia question. I can think of AVC, VP9, AV1, and VVC? Mark Donnigan: 01:21 Well, you just named three that I was thinking about and we're gonna discuss today! We've already covered AV1. Yeah, yeah, you answered correctly, but we haven't really considered where AVC, VP9, and VVC fit into the codec stew. So when I think about AVC, I'm almost tempted to just skip it because isn't this codec standard old news? I mean, c'mon. The entire video infrastructure of the internet is enabled by AVC, so what is there to discuss? Dror Gill: 01:57 Yeah. You're right. It's like the default, but in fact, the interesting thing is that today, we're (in) 2018 and this is the twenty year anniversary of AVC. I mean, ITU issued the call for proposals, their video coding expert group, issued the call for proposal for a project. At the time was called H26L, and their target was to double the coding efficiency, which effectively means halving the bit rate necessary for given level of fidelity. And that's why it was called H26L, it was supposed to be low bit rate. Mark Donnigan: 02:33 Ah! That's an interesting trivia question. Dror Gill: 02:35 That's where the L came from! Mark Donnigan: 02:36 I wonder how many of our listeners knew that? That's kind of cool. H26L. Dror Gill: 02:42 But they didn't go alone. It was the first time they joined forces in 2001 with the ISO MPEG, that's the same Motion Pictures Experts Group, you know we discussed in the first episode. Mark Donnigan: 02:56 That's right. Dror Gill: 02:57 And they came together, they joined forced, and they created JVT, that was the Joint Video Team, and I think it's a great example of collaboration. There are standards by dealing with video communication standards, and ISO MPEG, which is a standards body dealing with video entertainment standards. So, finally they understood that there's no point in developing video standards for these two different types of applications, so they got all the experts together in the JVT and this group developed what was the best video compression standard at the time. It was launched May 30, 2003. Mark Donnigan: 03:35 Wow. Dror Gill: 03:36 There was one drawback with this collaboration in that the video standard was known by two names. There was the ITU name which is H.264. And then there's the ISO MPEG name which is AVC, so these created some confusion at the start. I think by now, most of our listeners know that H.264 and AVC are two of the same. Mark Donnigan: 03:57 Yeah, definitely. So, AVC was developed 15 years ago and it's still around today. Dror Gill: 04:02 Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's really impressive and it's not only around, it's the most popular video compression standard in the world today. I mean, AVC is used to deliver video over the internet, to computers, televisions, mobile devices, cable, satellite, broadcast, and even blu-ray disks. This just shows you how long it takes from standardization to adoption, right? 15 years until we get this mass market adoption market dominance of H.264, AVC as we have today. Dror Gill: 04:31 And the reason it takes so long is that, we discussed it in our first episode, first you need to develop the standard. Then, you need to develop the chips that support the standard, then you need to develop devices that incorporate the chip. Even when initial implementation of the codec got released, they are still not as efficient as they can be, and it takes codec developers more time to refine it and improve the performance and the quality. You need to develop the tools, all of that takes time. Mark Donnigan: 04:59 It does. Yeah, I have a background in consumer electronics and because of that I know for certainty that AVC is gonna be with us for a while and I'll explain why. It's really simple. Decoding of H.264 is fully supported in every chip set on the market. I mean literally every chip set. There is not a device that supports video which does not also support AVC today. It just doesn't exist, you can't find it anywhere. Mark Donnigan: 05:26 And then when you look at in coding technologies for AVC, H.264, (they) have advanced to the point where you can really achieve state of the art for very low cost. There's just too much market momentum where the encode and decode ecosystems are just massive. When you think about entertainment applications and consumer electronics, for a lot of us, that's our primary market (that) we play in. Mark Donnigan: 05:51 But, if you consider the surveillance and the industrial markets, which are absolutely massive, and all of these security cameras you see literally everywhere. Drone cameras, they all have AVC encoders in them. Bottom line, AVC isn't going anywhere fast. Dror Gill: 06:09 You're right, I totally agree with that. It's dominant, but it's still here to stay. The problem is that, we talked about this, video delivery over the internet. The big problem is the bandwidth bottleneck. With so much video being delivered over the internet, and then the demand for quality is growing. People want higher resolution, they want HDR which is high dynamic range, they want higher frame rate. And all this means you need more and more bit rate to represent the video. The bit rate efficiency that is required today is beyond the standard in coding in AVC and that's where you need external technologies such as content adaptive encoding perceptual optimization that will really help you push AVC to its limits. Mark Donnigan: 06:54 Yeah. And Dror, I know you're one of the inventors of a perceptual optimization technique based on a really unique quality measure, which I've heard some in the industry believe could even extend the life of AVC from a bit rate efficiency perspective. Tell us about what you developed and what you worked on. Dror Gill: 07:13 Yeah, that's right. I did have some part in this. We developed a quality measure and a whole application around it, and this is a solution that can reduce the bit rate of AVC by 30%, sometimes even 40%. It doesn't get us exactly to where HEVC starts, 50% is pretty difficult and not for every content (type). But content distributors that recognize AVC will still be part of their codec mix for at least five years, I think what we've been able to do can really be helpful and a welcome relief to this bandwidth bottleneck issue. Mark Donnigan: 07:52 It sounds like we're in agreement that for at least the midterm horizon, the medium horizon, AVC is gonna stay with us. Dror Gill: 08:01 Yeah, yeah. I definitely think so. For some applications and services and certain regions of the world where the device penetration of the latest, high end models is not as high as in other parts, AVC will be the primary codec for some time to come. Dror Gill: 08:21 Okay, that's AVC. Now, let's talk about VP9. Mark Donnigan: 08:24 Yes, let's do that. Dror Gill: 08:25 It's interesting to me, essentially, it's mostly a YouTube codec. It's not a bad coded, it has some efficiency advantages over AVC, but outside of Google, you don't see any large scale deployments. By the way, if you look at Wikipedia, you read about the section that says where is VP9 used, it says VP9 is used mostly by YouTube, some uses by Netflix, and it's being used by Wikipedia. Mark Donnigan: 08:50 VP9 is supported fairly well in devices. Though, it's obviously hard to say exactly what the penetration is, I think there is support in hardware for decode for VP9. Certainly it's ubiquitous on Android, and it's in many of the UHD TV chip sets as well. So, it's not always enabled, but again, from my background on the hardware side, I know that many of those SOCs, they do have a VP9 decoder built into them. Mark Donnigan: 09:23 I guess the question in my mind is, it's talked about. Certainly Google is a notable both developer and user, but why hasn't it been adopted? Dror Gill: 09:33 Well, I think there are several issues here. One of them is compression efficiency. VP9 brings maybe 20, 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AVC, but it's not 50%. So, you're not doubling your compression efficiency. If you want to replace the codec, that's really a big deal. That's really a huge investment. You need to invest in coding infrastructure, new players. You need to do compatibility testing. You need to make sure that your packaging and your DRM work correctly and all of that. Dror Gill: 10:04 You really want to get a huge benefit to offset this investment. I think people are really looking for that 50% improvement, to double the efficiency, which is what you get with HEVC but not quite with VP9. I think the second point is that VP9, even though it's an open source coder, it's developed and the standard is maintained by Google. And some industry players are kind of afraid of the dominance of Google. Google has taken over the advertising market online. Mark Donnigan: 10:32 Yes, that's a good point. Dror Gill: 10:34 You know, and search and mobile operating systems, except Apple, it's all Android. So, those industry players might be thinking, I don't want to depend on Google for my video compression format. I think this is especially true for traditional broadcasters. Cable companies, satellite companies, TV channels that broadcast over the air. These companies traditionally like to go with established, international standards. Compression technologies that are standardized, they have the seal of approval by ITU and ISO. Dror Gill: 11:05 They're typically following that traditional codec developer past. ISO MPEG too, now it's AVC, starting with HEVC. What's coming next? Mark Donnigan: 11:16 Well, our next three letter codec is VVC. Tell us about VVC, Dror. Dror Gill: 11:21 Yeah, yeah, VVC. I think this is another great example of collaboration between ITU and ISO. Again, they formed a joint video experts team. This time it's called JVET. Dror Gill: 12:10 So, JVET has launched a project to develop a new video coding standard. And you know, we had AVC that was advanced video coding. Then we had HEVC which is high efficiency video coding. So, they thought, what would be the next generation? It's already advanced, it's high efficiency. So, the next one, they called it VVC, which is versatile video code. The objective of VVC is obviously to provide a significant improvement in compression efficiency over the existing HEVC standard. Development already started. The JVET group is meeting every few in months in some exotic place in the world and this process will continue. They plan to complete it before the end of 2020. So, essentially in the next two years they are gonna complete the standard. Dror Gill: 13:01 Today, already, even though VVC is in early development and they haven't implemented all the tools, they already report a 30% better compression efficiency than HEVC. So, we have high hopes that we'll be able to fight the video tsunami that is coming upon us with a much improved standard video coder which is VVC. I mean, its improved at least on the technical side and I understand that they also want to improve the process, right? Mark Donnigan: 13:29 That's right, that's right. Well, technical capabilities are certainly important and we're tracking of course VVC. 30% better efficiency this early in the game is promising. I wonder if the JVET will bring any learnings from the famous HEVC royalty debacles to VVC because I think what's in everybody's mind is, okay, great, this can be much more efficient, technically better. But if we have to go round and round on royalties again, it's just gonna kill it. So, what do you think? Dror Gill: 14:02 Yeah, that's right. I think it's absolutely true and many people in the industry have realized this, that you can't just develop a video standard and then handle the patent and royalty issues later. Luckily some companies have come together and they formed an industry group called The Media Coding Industry Forum, or MC-IF. They held their first meeting a few weeks ago in Macau during empic meeting one through four. Their purpose statement, let me quote this from their website, and I'll give you my interpretation of it. They say the media coding industry forum (MC-IF) is an open industry forum with a purpose of furthering the adoption of standards initially focusing on VVC, but establishing them as well accepted and widely used standards for the benefit of consumers and the industry. Dror Gill: 14:47 My interpretation is that the group was formed in an effort for companies with interest in this next generation video codec to come together and attempt to influence the licensing policy of VVC and try to agree on a reasonable patent licensing policy in advance to prevent history from repeating itself. We don't want that whole Hollywood story with the tragedy that took a few years until they reached the happy ending. So, what are you even talking about? This is very interesting. They're talking about having a modular structure for the codec. These tools of the codecs, the features, can be plugged in and out, very easily. Dror Gill: 15:23 So, if some company insists on reasonable licensing terms, this group can just decide not to support the feature and it will be very easily removed from the standard, or at least from the way that companies implement that standard. Mark Donnigan: 15:37 That's an interesting approach. I wonder how technically feasible it is. I think we'll get into that in some other episodes. Dror Gill: 15:46 Yeah. That may have some effect on performance. Mark Donnigan: 15:49 Exactly. And again, are we back in the situation that the Alliance for Open Media is in with AV1. Where part of the issue of the slow performance is trying to work around patents. At the end of the day you end up with a solution that is hobbled technically. Dror Gill: 16:10 Yeah. I hope it doesn't go there. Mark Donnigan: 16:13 Yeah, I hope we're not there. I think you heard this too, hasn't Apple joined the consortium recently? Dror Gill: 16:21 Yeah, yeah, they did. They joined silently as they always do. Silently means that one day somebody discovers their logo… They don't make any announcement or anything. You just see a logo on the website, and then oh, okay. Mark Donnigan: 16:34 Apple is in the building. Mark Donnigan: 16:41 You know, maybe it's good to kind of bring this discussion back to Earth and close out our three part series by giving the listeners some pointers. About how they should be thinking about the next codec that they adopt. I've been giving some thought as we've been doing these episodes. I think I'll kick it off here Dror if you don't mind, I'll share some of my thoughts. You can jump in. Mark Donnigan: 17:11 These are complex decisions of course. I completely agree, billing this as codec wars and codec battles, it's not helpful at the end of the day. Maybe it makes for a catchy headline, but it's not helpful. There's real business decisions (to be made). There are technical decisions. I think a good place to start for somebody who's listening and saying “okay great, I now have a better understanding of the lay of the land of HEVC, for AV1, I can understand VP9, I can understand AVC and what some of my options are to even further reduce bit rate. But now, what do I do?” Mark Donnigan: 17:54 And I think a good place to start is to just look at your customers, and do they lean towards early adopters. Are you in a strong economic environment, which is to say quite frankly, do most of your customers carry around the latest devices? Like an iPhone X, or Galaxy 9. If largely your customers lean towards early adopter and they're carrying around the latest devices, then you have an obligation to serve them with the highest quality and the best performance possible. Dror Gill: 18:26 Right. If your customers can receive HEVC, and it's half the bit rate, then why not deliver it to them better quality, or say when you see the end cost with this more efficient codec and everybody is happy. Mark Donnigan: 18:37 Absolutely, and again, I think just using pure logic. If somebody could afford a more than $1000 device in their pocket, probably the TV hanging on the wall is a very new, UHD capable (one). They probably have a game console in the house. The point is that you can make a pretty strong argument and an assumption that you can go, what I like to think of as all in HEVC including even standard definition, just SDR content. Mark Donnigan: 19:11 So, the industry has really lost sight in my mind of the benefits of HEVC as they apply across the board to all resolutions. All of the major consumer streaming services are delivering 4K using HEVC, but I'm still shocked at how many, it's kind of like oh, we forget that the same advantages of bit rate efficiency that work at 4K apply at 480p. Obviously, the absolute numbers are smaller because the file sizes are smaller, etc. Mark Donnigan: 19:41 But the point is, 30, 40, 50% savings applies at 4K as it does at 480p. I understand there's different applications in use cases, right? But would you agree with that? Dror Gill: 19:55 Yeah, yeah, I surely agree with that. I mean, for 4K, HEVC is really an enabler. Mark Donnigan: 20:00 That's right. Dror Gill: 20:01 For HEVC, you would need like 30, 40 megabits of video. Nobody can stream that to the home, but change it to 10, 15, that's reasonable, and you must use HEVC for 4k otherwise it won't even fit the pipe. But for all other resolutions, you get the bang with the advantage or you can trade it off for a quality advantage and deliver higher quality to your users, or higher frame rate, or enable HDR. If all of these possibilities that you can do with HD and even SD content, give them a better experience using HEVC and being able to stream on devices that your users already have. So yeah, I agree. I think it's an excellent analysis. Obviously if you're up in an emerging market, or your consumers don't have high end devices, then AVC is a good solution. If there are network constraints, and there are many places in the world that network conductivity isn't that great. Or in rural areas where we have very large parts of the population spread out (in these cases) bandwidth is low and you will get into a bottleneck even with HD. Mark Donnigan: 21:05 That's right. Dror Gill: 21:06 That's where perceptual optimization can help you reduce the bit rate even for AVC and keep within the constraints that you have. When your consumers can upgrade their devices and when the cycle comes in a few years when every device has HEVC support, then obviously you upgrade your capability and support HEVC across the board. Mark Donnigan: 21:30 Yeah, that's a very important point Dror, is that this HEVC adoption curve in terms of silicon, on devices. It is in full motion. Just the planning life cycles. If you look at what goes into hardware, and especially on the silicon side, it doesn't happen that way. Once these technologies are in the designs, once they are in the dies, once the codec is in silicon, it doesn't get arbitrarily turned on and off like light switches. Mark Donnigan: 22:04 How should somebody be looking at VP9, VVC, and AV1? Dror Gill: 22:13 Well, VP9 is an easy one. Unless you're Google, you're very likely gonna skip over this codec. Not just that the VP9 isn't the viable choice, it simply doesn't go so far as HEVC in terms of bit rate efficiency and quality. Maybe two years back we would consider it as an option for reducing bit rate, but now with the HEVC support that you have, there's no point in going to VP9. You might as well go to HEVC. If you talk about VVC, (the) standard is still a few years from being ratified so, we actually don't have anything to talk about. Dror Gill: 22:49 The important point is again to remember, even when VVC launches, it will still be another 2 to 3 years after ratifying the standard before you have even a very basic playback ecosystem in place. So, I would tell our listeners if you're thinking, why should I adopt HEVC, because VVC is just around the corner, well, that corner is very far. It's more like the corner of the Earth than the corner of the next block. Mark Donnigan: 23:15 That's right. Dror Gill: 23:18 So, HEVC today, VVC will be the next step in a few years. And then there's AV1. You know, we talked a lot about AV1. No doubt, AV1 has support from huge companies. I mean Google, Facebook, Intel, Netflix, Microsoft. And those engineers, they know what they're doing. But now, it's quite clear that compression efficiency is the same as HEVC. Meanwhile, after removing other royalty cost for content delivery, HEVC Advance removed it. The license situation is much more clear now. You add to this the fact that at the end of the day, two to three years, you're gonna need five to ten times more compute power to encode AV1, reaching effectively the same result. Now Google, again. Google may be that they have unlimited compute resources, they will use it. They developed it. Dror Gill: 24:13 The smaller content providers, all the other ones, the non Googles of the world and other broadcasters with growing support for HEVC that we expect in a few years. I think it's obvious. They're gonna support HEVC and then a few years later when VVC is ratified, when it's supported in devices, they're gonna move to VVC. Because this codec does have the required compression efficiency improvement over HEVC. Mark Donnigan: 24:39 Yeah, that's an excellent summary Dror. Thank you for breaking this all down for our listeners so succinctly. I'm sure this is really gonna provide massive value. I want to thank our amazing audience because without you, the Video Insiders Podcast would just be Dror and me taking up bits on a server somewhere. Dror Gill: 24:59 Yeah, talking to ourselves. Mark Donnigan: 25:01 As you can tell, video is really exciting to us and so we're so happy that you've joined us to listen. And again, this has been a production of Beamr Imaging Limited. Please, subscribe on iTunes and if you would like to try out beamer codecs in your lab or your production environment, we are giving away up to $100 of HEVC and H264 in coding every month. That's each and every month. Just go to https://beamer.com/free and get started immediately.
Is AV1 more efficient than HEVC? Dror & Mark get into the middle of a 3 against 1 standoff over whether AV1 is actually more efficient than HEVC. The following blog post first appeared on the Beamr blog at: https://blog.beamr.com/2018/11/23/codec-efficiency-is-in-the-eye-of-the-measurer-podcast/ When it comes to comparing video codecs, it's easy to get caught up in the “codec war” mentality. If analyzing and purchasing codecs was as easy as comparing fuel economy in cars, it would undoubtedly take a lot of friction out of codec comparison, but the reality is that it's not that simple. In Episode 02, The Video Insiders go head-to-head comparing two of the leading codecs in a three against one standoff over whether AV1 is more efficient than HEVC. So, which is more efficient? Listen in to this week's episode, “Codec Efficiency Is in the Eye of the Measurer,” to find out. Want to join the conversation? Reach out to TheVideoInsiders@beamr.com. TRANSCRIPTION (lightly edited to improve readability only) Mark Donnigan: 00:41 Hi everyone I am Mark Donnigan and I want to welcome you to episode two of the Video Insiders. Dror Gill: 00:48 And I am Dror Gill. Hi there. Mark Donnigan: 00:50 In every episode of the Video Insiders we bring the latest inside information about what's happening in the video technology industry from encoding, to packaging, to delivery, and playback, and even the business behind the video business. Every aspect of the video industry is covered in detail on the Video Insiders podcast. Dror Gill: 01:11 Oh yeah, we usually do cover everything from pixels, to blocks, to microblocks, to frames, to sequences. We go all the way up and down the video delivery chain and highlight the most important things you should know before you send any video bits over the wire. Mark Donnigan: 01:28 In our first episode we talked about a very hot topic which asked, “Hasn't this kind of been worn out?” The whole HEVC, AV1 discussion. But I think it was very interesting. I sure enjoyed the talk. What about you Dror? Dror Gill: 01:47 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I sure did. It was great talking about the two leading codecs. I don't want to say the word, codec war. Mark Donnigan: 01:58 No, no, we don't believe in codec wars. Dror Gill: 01:59 We believe in codec peace. Mark Donnigan: 02:00 Yeah, that's true. Why is it so complicated to compare video codecs? Why can't it be as simple as fuel economy of cars, this one gets 20 miles per gallon and that one gets 30 and then I make a decision based on that. Dror Gill: 02:15 I wish it was that simple with video codecs. In video compression you have so many parameters to consider. You have the encoding tools, tools are grouped into what's called profiles and levels, or as AV1 calls them “experiments.” Mark Donnigan: 02:31 Experiments, mm-hmm… Dror Gill: 02:35 When you compare the codecs which profiles and levels do you use. What rate control method? Which specific parameters do you set for each codec? And each codec can have hundreds, and hundreds of parameters. Then there is the question of implementation. Which software implementation of the codec do you use? Some implementations are reference implementations that are used for research, and others are highly performance optimized commercial implementations. Which one do you select for the test? And then, which operating system, what hardware do you run on, and obviously what test content? Because encoding two people talking, or encoding an action scene for a movie, is completely different. Dror Gill: 03:13 Finally, when you come to evaluate your video, what quality measure do you use? There're various objective quality measures and some people use actual human viewers and they assesses subjective quality of the video. On that front also, there're many possibilities that you need to choose from. Mark Donnigan: 03:32 Yeah, so many questions and no wonder the answers are not so clear. I was quite surprised when I recently read three different technical articles published at IBC actually, effectively comparing AV1 versus HEVC and I can assume that each of the authors did their research independently. What was surprising was they came to the exact same conclusion, AV1 has the same compression efficiency as HEVC. This is surprising because some other studies and one in particular (I think we'll talk about) out there says the contrary. So can you explain what this means exactly, Dror. Dror Gill: 04:16 By saying that they have the same compression efficiency, this means that they can reach the same quality at the same bitrate or the other way round. You need the same bitrate to reach that same quality. If you need for example, two and a half megabits per second to encode an HD video file using HEVC at a certain quality, then with AV1 you would need roughly the same bitrate to reach that same quality and this means that AV1 and HEVC provide the same compression level. In other words, this means that AV1 does not have any technical advantage over HEVC because it has the same compression efficiency. Of course that's if we put aside all the loyalty issues but we discussed that last time. Right? Mark Donnigan: 04:56 That's right. The guys who wrote the three papers that I'm referencing are really top experts in the field. It's not seminar work done by a student, not to downplay those papers, but the point is these are professionals. One was written by the BBC in cooperation with the Multimedia and Vision Group at the Queen Mary University of London. I think nobody is going to say that the BBC doesn't know a thing or two about video. The second was written by Ateme, and the third by Harmonic, leading vendors. Mark Donnigan: 05:29 I actually pulled out a couple of phrases from each that I'd like to quote. First the BBC and Queen Mary University, here is a conclusion that they wrote, “The results obtained show in general a similar performance between AV1 and the reference HEVC both objectively and subjectively.” Which is interesting because they did take the time to both do the visual assessment as well as use a quality measure. Mark Donnigan: 06:01 Ateme said, “Results demonstrate AV1 to have equivalent performance to HEVC in terms of both objective and subjective video quality test results.” Dror Gill: 06:10 Yeah, very similar. Mark Donnigan: 06:16 And then here is what Harmonic said, “The findings are that AV1 is not more advantageous today than HEVC on the compression side and much more complex to encode than HEVC.” What do you make of this? Dror Gill: 06:32 I don't know. It sounds pretty bad to me, even two of those papers also analyzed subjective quality so they used actual human viewers to check out the quality. But Mark what if I told you that researchers from the University of Klagenfurt in Austria together with Bitmovin published a paper which showed completely different results. What would you say about that? Mark Donnigan: 06:57 Tell me more. Dror Gill: 06:58 Last month in Athens I was the ICIP conference that's the IEEE International Conference on Image Compression and Image Processing. There was this paper presented by this University in Austria with Bitmovin and their conclusion was, let me quote, “When using weighted PSNR, AV1 performs consistently better for bit rate compared to AVC, HEVC, and VP9.” So they claim AV1 is better than three codecs but specifically it's better than HEVC. And then they have a table in their article that compares AV1 to HEVC for six different video clips. The table shows that with AV1 you get up to 25% lower bitrate at the same quality than HEVC. Dror Gill: 07:43 I was sitting there in Athens last month when they presented this and I was shocked. Mark Donnigan: 07:50 What are the chances that three independent papers are wrong and only this paper got it right? And by the way, the point here is not three against one because presumably there're some other papers. I'm guessing other research floating around that might side with Bitmovin. The point is that three companies who no one is going to say that any of them are not experts and not highly qualified to do a video assessment, came up with such a different result. Tell us what you think is going on here? Dror Gill: 08:28 I was thinking the same thing. How can that be. During the presentation I asked one of the authors who presented the paper a few questions and it turned out that they made some very questionable decisions in all of that sea of possibility that I talked about before. Decisions related to coding tools, codec parameters, and quality measures. Dror Gill: 08:51 First of all, in this paper they didn't show any results of subjective viewing. Only the objective metrics. Now we all know that you should always your eyes, right? Mark Donnigan: 09:03 That's right. Dror Gill: 09:04 Objective metrics, nice numbers, but obviously you need to view the video because that's how the actual viewers are going to assess the (video) quality. The second thing is that they only used the single objective metric and this was PSNR. PSNR, it stands for peak signal-to-noise ratio and basically this measure is a weighted average of the difference in peaks between pixel values of the two images. Dror Gill: 09:30 Now, we're Video Insiders, but even if you're not an insider you know that PSNR is not a very good quality measure because it does not correlate very well with human vision. This is the measure that they choose to look at but what was most surprising is that there is a flag in the HEVC open source encoder which they used that if chosen, the result is improved PNSR. What it does, it turns off some psycho-visual optimizations which make the video look better but reduce the PSNR, and that's turned on by default. So you would expect that they're measuring PSNR they would turn that flag on so you would get higher PSNR. Well, they didn't. They didn't turn the flag on! Mark Donnigan: 10:13 Amazing. Dror Gill: 10:17 Finally, even then AV1 is much slower than HEVC, and they also reported in this data that it was much, much slower than HEVC but still they did not use the slowest encoding standing of HEVC, which would provide the best quality. There's always a trade off between performance and quality. The more tools you employ the better quality you can squeeze out of the video, of course that takes you more CPU cycles but they used for HEVC, the third slowest setting which means this is the third best quality you can get with that codec and not the very best quality. When you handicap an HEVC encoder in this way, it's not surprising that you get such poor results. Dror Gill: 11:02 I think based on all these points everybody can understand why the results of this comparison were quite different than all of the other comparison that were published a month earlier at IBC (by Ateme, BBC, Harmonic). Mark Donnigan: 11:13 It's interesting. Mark Donnigan: 11:14 Another critical topic that we have to cover is performance. If you measure the CPU performance on encoding time of AV1, I believe that it's pretty universally understood that you are going to find it currently is a hundred times slower than HEVC. Is that correct? Dror Gill: 11:32 Yeah, that's right. Typically, you measure the performance of an encoder and FPS which is frames per second. For HEVC it's common to measure an FPM which is frames per minute. Mark Donnigan: 11:42 Frames per minute, (more like) frames per hour, FPH. Dror Gill: 11:45 A year and a half ago or a year ago when there were very initial implementation, it was really FPD or FPH, Frames per hour or per day and you really needed to have a lot of patience, but now after they've done some work it's only a hundred times slower than HEVC. Mark Donnigan: 12:02 Yeah, that's pretty good. They're getting there. But some people say that the open source implementation of AV1 I believe it's AOM ENC. Dror Gill: 12:11 Yeah, AOM ENC. Mark Donnigan: 12:16 ENC exactly has not been optimized for performance at all. One thing I like about speed is either your encoder produces X number of frames per second or per minute, or it doesn't. It's really simple. Here is my next question for you. Proponents of AV1 are saying, “well it's true it's slow but it hasn't been optimized, the open source implementation,” which is to imply that there's a lot of room (for improvement) and that we're just getting started, “don't worry we'll close the gap.” But if you look at the code, and by the way I may be a marketing guy but my formal education is computer science. Mark Donnigan: 13:03 You can see it already includes performance optimizations. I mean eptimizations like MMX, SSE, there's AVX instructions, there's CPU optimization, there's multithreading. It seems like they're already trying to make this thing go faster. So how are they going to close this a hundred X (time) gap? Dror Gill: 13:22 I don't think they can. I mean a hundred X, that's a lot and you know even the AV1 guys they even admit that they won't be able to close the gap. I talked to a few senior people who're involved in the Alliance for Open Media and even they told me that they expect AV1 to five to 10 times more complex than HEVC at the end of the road. In two to three years after all optimization are done, it's still going to be more complex than HEVC. Dror Gill: 13:55 Now, if you ask me why it's so complex I'll tell you my opinion. Okay, this is my personal opinion. I think it's because they invested a lot of effort in side stepping the patents (HEVC). Mark Donnigan: 14:07 Good point. I agree. Dror Gill: 14:07 They need to get that compression efficiency which is the same as HEVC but they need to use algorithms that are not patented. They have methods that use much more CPU resources than the original patent algorithms to reach the same results. You can call it kind of brute force implementation of the same thing to avoid the patent issue. That's my personal opinion, but the end result I think is clear, it's going to be five to 10 times slower than HEVC. It has the same compression efficiency so I think it's quite questionable. This whole notion of using AV1 to get better results. Mark Donnigan: 14:45 Absolutely. If you can encode let's say on a single computer with HEVC a full ABR stack, this is what people want to do. But here we're talking speeds that are so slow let's just try and do (encode) one stream. Literally what you're saying is you'll need five to 10 computers to do the same encode with AV1. I mean, that's just not viable. It doesn't make sense to me. Dror Gill: 15:14 Yeah, why would you invest so much encoding into getting the same results. If you look at another aspect of this, let's talk about hardware encode. Companies that have large data centers, companies that are encoding vast amount of video content are not looking into moving from the traditional software encoding and CPUs and GPUs, to dedicated hardware. We're hearing talks about FPGAs even ASICs … by the way this is a very interesting trend in itself that we'll probably cover in one of the next episodes. But in the context of AV1, imagine a chip that is five to 10 times larger than an HEVC chip and which is the same complexity efficiency. The question I ask again is why? Why would anybody design such a chip, and why would anybody use it when HEVC is available today? It's much easier to encode, royalty issues have been practically solved so you know? Mark Donnigan: 16:06 Yeah, it's a big mystery for sure. One thing I can say is the Alliance for Open Media has done a great service to HEVC by pushing the patent holders to finalize their licensing terms … and ultimately make them much more rational shall we say? Dror Gill: 16:23 Yeah. Mark Donnigan: 16:25 Let me say that as we're an HEVC vendor and speaking on behalf of others (in the industry), we're forever thankful to the Alliance for Open Media. Dror Gill: 16:36 Definitely, without the push from AOM and the development of AV1 we would be stuck with HEVC royalty issue until this day. Mark Donnigan: 16:44 That was not a pretty situation a few years back, wow! Dror Gill: 16:48 No, no, but as we said in the last episode we have a “happy ending” now. (reference to episode 1) Mark Donnigan: 16:52 That's right. Dror Gill: 16:52 Billions of devices support HEVC and royalty issues are pretty much solved, so that's great. I think we've covered HEVC and AV1 pretty thoroughly in two episodes but what about the other codecs? There's VP9, you could call that the predecessor of AV1, and then there's VVC, which is the successor of HEVC. It's the next codec developed by MPEG. Okay, VP9 and VVC I guess we have a topic for our next episode, right? Mark Donnigan: 17:21 It's going to be awesome. Narrator: 17:23 Thank you for listening to the Video Insider podcast a production of Beamr limited. To begin using Beamr codecs today go to beamr.com/free to receive up to 100 hours of no cost HEVC and H.264 transcoding every month.
On the show today I talk about some range updates with the RMR and plans for the VP9, there is a little bit of politics and some privacy steps with the webs. We also have some feedback on where to go online to buy and sell. Please feel free to send in feedback for the […]
This week: a company unlike any other, some say Steve Job’s greatest product was Apple itself, but how have they fared in the 6 years since his passing? Leander shares the cold hard facts. Plus: Leander’s long soliloquy about his new love, the 4K Apple TV; an iOS 11 software trick doubles your iPhone storage; and we’ll wrap up our favorite minimalist cases for your iPhone 7, 8, and X. This episode supported by Build a beautiful, responsive website quick at Squarespace.com. Enter offer code CultCast at checkout to get 10% off. Squarespace—Build it Beautiful. CultCloth will keep your iPhone 7, Apple Watch, Mac and iPad sparkling clean, and for a limited time you can use code CULTCAST to score a free CleanCloth with any order at CultCloth.co. The Cult of Mac watch store has the best straps in the biz! Save 20% off any order with code CultCast at checkout. Thanks to Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com for the great music you hear on today's show. On the show this week @erfon / @bst3r / @lkahney Photos and videos shot in iOS 11's HEIF/HEVC format are literally now half the size they were in iOS10’s JPG/H.264 formats Catch our CultCast 300 live celebration show on Tuesday, October 10th at 12PM PT! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RweyyksGEqQ 9 beautifully minimalist cases for your iPhone 8 & 8 Plus (and 7/7Plus) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhsoKFLYBuw&t=1s Google's Pixel Buds translation will change the world https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/04/google-pixel-buds-translation-change-the-world/ Google announced all sorts of stuff yesterday Pixel 2, a smart speaker called the Max to compete with the HomePod But at the very end of their key, Google introduced the Pixel Buds, wireless headphones designed for use with the company's new Pixel 2 handset. Once paired, you can tap the right earphone then issue a command. If you say, "Help me speak Japanese" and then start speaking in English, the Pixel’s speakers will output your translated words as you speak them. The other party's reply into the phone will then play into your ear through the Pixel Buds in English. 40 languages are currently supported, and the translation works in real time with virtually no lag. Apple TV 4K is almost picture-perfect [Review] https://www.cultofmac.com/504719/apple-tv-4k-review/ Apple’s newest set-top box pulls out all the stops to be the best on the field. It’s packing incredibly powerful new hardware that leaves competitors in the dust, and a much-improved tvOS platform that is years ahead of its rivals. Remote. Not much has changed for the Siri Remote, either, which is a shame — it’s still wretched. It looks almost identical this year, except there’s now a white ridge around the Menu button. Speed. Thanks to an A10X Fusion processor — the same one you’ll find in the latest iPad Pro — Apple TV 4K is pretty fast. It’s by far the most powerful set-top box on the market, and that’s not just for 4K video. 4K HDR video is sharp, colorful and full of contrast and detail. The screensavers especially are spectacular and detailed. Shot in 4K, the screensavers were downgraded for the old AppleTV. On the 4K box they appear in all their trippy, hypnotic detail. One thing you won’t be able to enjoy in 4K HDR, however, is YouTube. That’s because Apple doesn’t support the VP9 video format that YouTube serves up — it doesn’t work on macOS or iOS, either — so the best you’ll get is 1080p. Our favorite iPhone 8/8Plus cases Edward Field Wallet Case $99 Nodus iPhone 8 Cases Rhinoshield Crashguard bumper for iPhone 8 Plus/7Plus iPhone 8/7
There's a lot of detail out now about the Apple TV 4K and of course the iPhone 8, so Mike and Charles wade into the thick of it and pull out all the good stuff for you, even ahead of this week's special guest! Apple recently got the honor of the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus being named the world's fastest smartphones (by a country mile, we might add), and that's before they've even tested the iPhone X. In addition, the new iPhones also got the best-ever marks given to smartphones from the revised DXO benchmarks (which, though widely regarded, are not scientific). There is also, as predicted, a teardown report -- but there's not much to say there, the innards (apart from the remarkable A11 Bionic) are largely the same, albeit with the notable fact that these new iPhones are doing so much more even with a (slightly) smaller battery. But wait, it's not *all* about the iPhone! The crew also go over the facts on Intel's latest delay (the fourth) of the Cannon Lake chips and beyond (not great news, sorry to say), and look into a "caveat emptor" situation with regards to AppleCare+ costs (suffice to say, avoid breaking the back glass on these new iPhones). There's also some updates on Qualcomm versus Apple that are probably good news for Apple; some insight on Google's acqui-hire of HTC's Pixel engineering team (a key asset HTC were fools to let go of), along with the continuing benefits of Apple's ecosystem versus that of Android (or Windows, for that matter); and a caution about using non-MFi approved Qi chargers with your new Apple gear. And that's just the first half!! We take a break from all the news to welcome our special guest Don Klees from Acorn TV, a streaming video service that focuses on the best TV (and some movies) from outside the US but primarily in the English-speaking world (the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and more). At $5 a month, if you enjoy PBS-type programming you should probably check it out. From there, we have a lot of news related to the Apple TV 4K, starting with Google's decision not to support VP9 (their 4K codec) on the Apple TV 4K (or the Mac); good news that iTunes redemption codes (seen on some HD and 4K Blu-rays) work for streaming 4K versions of the film on Apple TV 4K (but no downloading); the very quiet change from Apple to allow iTunes movie renters to watch the films over (up to) 48 hours instead of the previous 24 once you'd started viewing it (you can hold on to the film for up to 30 days if you haven't gotten around to starting to watch it yet); and the surprising killing of the Videos app on iOS 11 in favor of the TV app, which finally has a purpose for non-Apple TV owners. There's also news that live news and live sports will be coming to the TV app in the near future. Whew! We wrap up this super-dense hour with a quick look at some interesting ARKit-based app for iOS 11; a new payment system that uses your veins (what?!); and issue a shout-out to recent cadet recruit Horvath from Hungary, who wrote us a lovely fan letter. All this and (believe it or not) a bit more, so bust out the hip-waders, cadets, it's gonna get more than knee deep aboard the Space Javelin this time!
Android-App Go Keyboard soll Nutzer ausspionieren Sicherheitsforschern von Adguard zufolge schneidet die weit verbreitete App Go Keyboard heimlich verschiedene Nutzerdaten wie unter anderem die Mailadresse des Googleacconts, Kontakte und den Standort mit und sendet diese an Server des Anbieters. Auch der Zugriff auf das Mikrofon soll gegeben sein. Schlimmer noch: die App soll ohne Erlaubnis des Nutzers Code herunterladen und ausführen können. Kein YouTube in 4K auf Apple TV Die YouTube-App für tvOS dürfte zumindest auf absehbare Zeit auch auf dem Apple TV 4K keine Ultra-HD-Wiedergabe unterstützen. Google nutzt den freien Codec VP9, den der Internetkonzern selbst entwickelt hat. Apple bietet einen Einsatz von VP9 auch in seinem Safari-Browser nicht an, weshalb sich weder auf iPhone und iPad noch auf dem Mac YouTube-4K-Videos in dieser Web-Software nutzen lassen. Trumps Schwiegersohn nutzte privates E-Mail-Konto für Staatsbelange Jared Kushner ist dabei erwischt worden, über eine private Domain E-Mails zu versenden, die von Gesetz wegen öffentlich archiviert werden müssen. Hillary Clinton war Ähnliches im Wahlkampf zum Verhängnis geworden. Kushners Anwalt betonte, dass Kushner inzwischen alle E-Mails mit Bezug zu seiner Tätigkeit im Weißen Haus zu seinem staatlichen E-Mail-Konto weitergeleitet, so dass sie, wie vorgeschrieben, archiviert werden können. Serienstart von Star Trek Discovery In den USA ist die neue Star-Trek-Serie Discovery gestartet; in Deutschland ist die Serie jetzt auch auf Netflix zu sehen. Die erste Staffel soll 15 Folgen beinhalten. Discovery spielt etwa zehn Jahre vor der ersten Star-Trek-Serie mit Captain James T. Kirk und somit nach den Ereignissen von Star Trek: Enterprise. Diese Serie hatte mit der Gründung der Föderation der Planeten geendet. Diese und alle weiteren aktuellen Nachrichten finden sie auf heise.de
I spend the whole hour talking about the online melt down surrounding the Sig P320 "failure" with one particular drop test. New Gun! H&K VP9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhm-IGOIdSs
Hakuro Matsuda さんをゲストに迎えて、WWDC 2017 について話しました。 Show Notes WWDC Keynote, June 2017 iMac - Apple USB Power Delivery NEW YubiKey 4C featuring USB-C revealed at CES 2017 Google to OEMs: Don’t use Qualcomm Quick Charge; USB-PD is the future AMD Threadripper 1920 12-Core CPU & Vega 16GB/8GB Cards Leaked Intel’s Core i9 Extreme Edition CPU is an 18-core beast iMac Pro Apple's Metal 2 API Adds External GPU, VR Support to macOS iMac memory specifications APFS Introduction Craig (@_HairForceOne) macOS High Sierra Preview Metal 2 Indirect Drawing ARKit Apple Acquires Augmented Reality Company Metaio Tango Nvidia G-SYNC – variable refresh rate technology High Efficiency Video Coding, H.265, and 4K compression explained MPEG LA VP9 HLS Vs Dash Apple introduces a completely redesigned App Store “MP3 is dead” missed the real, much better story LAME MP3 Encoder Core ML Google Announces Tensorflow Lite: A Neural Network Library for Mobile Phones Converting Trained Models to Core ML
Followup Episode 1 audio Doug mis-spoke VP9 quality and bitrates iPhone 6S H265 Mediatek 10 Core SoC x20 Dev Board More info Titan X, Again! New Intel Chips - Coffee Lake Are software encoders relevant? Xeons specifically for video Intel VCA board (Xeon PCIE boards) FPGA vs ASICS ASICS for Tensorflow FPGAs for Robot Arms
Dave Farnsworth, WJ2O Dave has been a licensed ham since 1970 has enjoyed a passion for DXing and CW Contesting. An experienced DXpeditioner he has traveled to and operated from over 40 different DXCC entities. They include being a member of the last group of hams on Navassa (KP1) in 1993 and joining KK6EK on Easter Island (XR0Y) in 1995 as well as Clipperton (TX5K) in 2013. His list of operations are: 3DA0 (twice), 6W, 6Y5, 8P, C6A (twice), CE, CE0A, EI, ES, F, FJ, FM, FO8, FS, GI, GJ, GU, J3, J6, KH6, KP1, KP2, KP4, LU, LY, OX, P4, PJ2, PJ4, PZ, SP, TF, V2, V31, VE (Zones 1 & 2), VP2E (twice), VP5 (6 times), VP9, YL, ZF, ZP and ZS. He maintains details of each trip at http://www.wj2o.com. Since the age of 22, Dave has been a small business entrepreneur building a number of different enterprises. He currently operates a software and database development firm. He and his wife raised two daughters and enjoy four grandchildren. Source: https://vk0ek.org/the-team/
On the show today I talk about the VP9 from H&K and also about a court case that happened a couple of years ago and what are some of the lessons that can be learned. Please feel free to send in feedback for the show on any topics that you like. Voice Mail 206 745-2731 […]
This week, we catch up with Bob (formerly known as "the new shooter"). We first talked to Bob back on Episode 30 after he'd just shot his first match, caught up with him six months later on Episode 54 to talk about progressing as a competitor. Most recently, we brought him in to help us with Episode 100, our PPQ vs VP9 shootout. Today, he's back to talk about shooting competition even if you don't practice all the time like Ben and Luke. He has some thoughts about fitting competition in to life with family and other time commitments. He also talks level of participation, current level of skill, and how to enjoy shoot matches even if you're not planning to try and make Master class. The NewsThe main news story this week is Oklahoma passing a bill to allow authorized staff in K-12 schools to carry concealed at school. It still requires extra training and may not be adopted by all schools or school districts, but it's an excellent move forward for good guys with guns to stop bad guys with guns, especially protecting our children. Tip of the WeekDon't forget to take yourself in to account in your evaluation of gear. Sometimes, especially for older shooters, it's important to make sure your gun, holster, sights, trigger, grip, and everything else still work for you over time. Whether you're getting smarter by learning better techniques or older with achy joints, it's always worth it to pull the carry gun out and dry fire every once in a while.
Episode 43 Rushing into Oblivion - This week the hosts discuss a variety of topics from last minute VP9 magazine acquisitions to diesel engine woes. Facebook iTunes Stitcher You can email the show with questions or comments at geeksgadgetsandguns@gmail.com
For Episode 100 we decided to do something a little special: We got our paws on an HK VP9 and a Walther PPQ and took them to the range to shoot side by side with Bob who's been on the podcast in Episodes 30 and 54. We shot about 300 rounds between the two pistols, rotating shooters, and doing our best to find out where the weak points are on both of them. The two pistols are surprisingly similar, both being polymer 9mm service pistols close in size to the Glock 19. Both the VP9 and PPQ hold 15 rounds on 9mm in the magazine, and aesthetically they look very close. The full review on the HK VP9 vs. Walther PPQ can be found on the blog.
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