H.264 today. 4K, H.265 & VP9 tomorrow.

We are always trumpeting and promoting and telling you about the latest and greatest new technologies. Just because they are the hot new thing, doesn't mean that it will fit into your workflows, budget or exisiting infra-structure. In addition you don't want to get to far ahead of your custoemrs and audiences ability to view and enjoy your productions. This article from Streaming Medai does a very good job of exlaining the why for now, H.264 remains the best choice for content delivery.

Streaming Media by Robert Reinhardt Where do we start a conversation about best practices for encoding in the first half of 2015? If you follow bleeding-edge streaming media news, you might believe that it’s time to start thinking about delivering 4K content using the latest crop of “codecs in testing”—H.265 and VP9. I feel that’s largely a distraction at this point in the game. So, let me get straight to the point: H.264 will and should be your primary focus for the foreseeable future of VOD encoding. Why? It has the widest adoption—across set-top boxes, smartphones, tablets, mobile browsers, desktop browsers—to date. Period. Sure, some browsers, such as Opera, don’t support H.264 (and likely won’t support H.265). If those browsers are worth accommodating, then you might need to take measures to add another format to satisfy requirements. On desktop, Adobe Flash Player is still a legitimate fallback in the browser tech stack. Most premium content offerings, especially for live video playback, require Flash for playback of DRM video. (This year’s Super Bowl, for example, didn’t use DASH.) read more...