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Video: How Do You Achieve Consistent Quality for VOD?

One recurring problem with VOD viewing is an inconsistent viewing experience across different clips in an ABR environment, even when the same encoding profile is used for each clip delivered to a particular user. In this excerpt from his presentation at Content Delivery Summit 2016, Jeremy Bennington of video QA solution provider V-Factor Technologies using a software-based solution with pixel-level analytics to assess video quality at different bitrates through a fixed encoding ladder, and ensure consistent delivery across multiple clips using each encoding profile.

Watch How Do You Achieve Consistent Quality for Live Streaming?

Learn more about VOD viewing experience at Streaming Media West.

Read the transcript of Bennington's remarks in the clip above:

Jeremy Bennington: How do we achieve consistent quality for VOD? If you have a fixed bitrate ladder and you've got 3 different pieces of content, you end up with 3 different resulting qualities. Video 1 and Video 2, had excellent quality at 4 Mbps, but Video 3 was only good, and as you continue to encode that down to different bitrates, you've got different resulting qualities. This is what's typically done in an ABR environment for VOD. You set up the bitrates you thought were best from the laboratory and you go put that into production, but you end up yielding very different qualities. 

With our type of technology, what you'd aim to do is to achieve a consistent quality across those profiles and adjust the bandwidth and encoding as required to yield that. You would employ a pixel-level type of analytics to achieve excellent quality for every single one of those pieces of video content, whether it be a movie or any type of content. In this case, the first one required 4 Mbps.

The second one required 3 Mbps and one required 6 Mbps, and so you achieve what they call content-based encoding or per-title based encoding instead of the fixed bitrate ladder. The only way to achieve this would be to do either of two things: Have someone sit there and QA every piece of VOD content that comes through with every single bitrate and be able to consistently score it, which I can tell you from a human perspective is nearly impossible to watch the same video across different bit rates and consistently score it, because you get tired; or you have different people, they're trained differently, and they have different perspectives. Or you have software do this for you, to actually look at the pixels and figure out what does it look like, and then go from there in terms of achieving your consistent quality.

 

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