Streaming Learning Center

A comment on one of my posts inspired this collection of H.264 resources for the Newbie. If you're new to H.264, the articles and tutorials listed are a great way to quickly get up to speed.

All’s been quiet on the Streaming Learning Center front as I spent the last week teaching several courses on streaming media production and encoding at the lovely Stanford Campus at Palo Alto. Other than a quick sneak peak at the new Final Cut Studio, which you can read about here, it was pretty much full immersion into the streaming world from a user’s perspective. This led to several conclusions about the future of streaming video and Microsoft Silverlight that I thought I would share.

Over the next two or three years, streaming producers will be increasingly tasked supplying optimized video streams to devices as disparate as cell phones and set top boxes, along with different quality versions for users accessing the content over the general Internet. While there have been multiple proprietary approaches to this problem, including Microsoft’s multiple bit rate video, one very strong candidate will be an H.264 extension called Scalable Video Coding.

I recently taught an H.264-specific class at Streaming Media East in New York. Though the class was 3 hours long, I can distill a bunch of useful knowledge into this column if you don't mind missing the sample videos and example screens, not to mention the insightful and surprisingly compelling lecture. Click over to the  article for the complete skinny.

 

Whenever I speak at industry groups about H.264, and detail the upcoming royalty obligation, some attendees are invariably surprised that using H.264 will generate royalties. Here's what you need to know about H.264 and royalties, in an except from an article that I wrote for StreamingMedia.com.

[Breaking news - On February 3, 2010, MPEG-LA announced a continuation of free pricing for free Internet distribution of H.264 video. Read the release here, and an interview with Larry Horn, MPEG-LA CEO, here.]

I produced a short corporate seminar in May, and the client asked for a list of H.264-related references. If these references are worthwhile for them, perhaps they might be worthwhile for you, so here they are.

Here's an overview of YouTube's new HD H.264-based offering, and a deep look at the encoding parameters YouTube uses. If you're producing H.264 video, or post videos to YouTube, you should have a look.

One of the lingering rumors about H.264 is that you need a beast of a computer to play it back. Is this a reality or part of an insidious Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt campaign inspired by H.264 detractors and competitors. Well, read the article and find out!

As you may know, if you stream H.264 video from your website, you may owe the H.264 patent group royalties starting in 2011. I say "may" because the patent group hasn't yet defined the royalty structure that will apply, apparently waiting for a self-imposed deadline of around December 2009. I detail what we do know in a soon to be released article in StreamingMedia.com, but the royalty could be hundreds of thousands of dollars for multinational corporations like Coca Cola or Disney.

One of the more intriguing rumors to come out of Streaming Media East was that Microsoft was going to add H.264 playback to Silverlight and/or the Windows Media Player. The idea made so much sense that it was instantly believable, but Microsoft has denied the rumor’s veracity, repeatedly saying “I have not had sex with that woman” in a vaguely southern accent. Or at least that’s what I keep hearing. In this column, I’ll lay out the reasons that Microsoft should consider adding H.264 support in Silverlight and Media Player and dropping continued development of VC-1.