Something to keep an eye out for regarding royalty-free video codexes is AV1 from the Streaming Media Alliancehttps://www.streamingvideoalliance.org/. While it's still under development with a final code freeze expected by 12/31/17 it shows promise of doing better than HEVC and not having any of the royalty nightmares from HEVC patent pools. Before diving into AV1, let's take a look at the organization building it, the Alliance for Open Media. In What is AV1?http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/What-Is-.../What-is-AV1-111497.aspx Jan Ozer writes: > The Alliance for Open Media was announced on September 1, 2015, with charter members Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix....
Apple announced support for HEIF and HEVC high-performance video and image formats in macOS High Sierra at WWDC in 2017. While you can create content and share it free of charge all other users require content producers to license content for distribution. Unlike h264 there are multiple patent pools for HEVC, each with its own royalty schemes and cost for developers and, eventually, end users. The HEVC patent pools I'm aware of are: - HEVC Advancehttps://www.hevcadvance.com/ - MPEG-LAhttp://www.mpegla.com/main/default.aspx - Velos Mediahttp://velosmedia.com/ Other patent holders are not joining pools and want to license their technologies individually I know that Apple has...
I was working on reencoding videos to HEVC from DVD content I had ripped off before I lost access to a DVD player on my laptop. Yay, Apple. I couldn't understand why the captions in .ass format would not render with the formatting they were created with. A quick jump on the FFMPEG web chat made it clear that it was a container issue, not a caption or re-encoding one. Not all container formats support the same feature sets. Wikipedia's Comparison of Video Containershttps://www.wikiwand.com/en/Comparisonofvideocontainerformats gives you an idea of the breadth and depth of the container fields out there. This...
One thing that has always intrigued me is how people read online and how it affects the way we structure web content. Most of my influence comes from Jakob Nielsen and the Nielsen Norman group's research on how people read online. Back in 1997, Nielsen reported that: > As a result, Web pages have to employ scannable text, using > > - highlighted keywords hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others > - meaningful sub-headings not "clever" ones > - bulleted lists > - one idea per paragraph users will skip over any...
When we talk about visual disabilities we usually concentrate on color blindness without realizing that that are other visual accessibility issues that we tend to ignore. This came to bite me when I was testing a page using Chrome Dev Tools accessibility Test process fully described in Accessibility: Test your contenthttps://publishing-project.rivendellweb.net/accessibility-test-your-content/ where the color of my code blocks using Prism and the Solarized light theme were not providing enough contrast between text and background. At an instinctual level I understand why this is important but how much contrast is too little and how do I measure it? What role does...
We normally work with the stylesheets we develop for the content we create. This is one of the style sheets available and that interact in the CSS cascade: The browser has a basic style sheet that gives a default style to any document. These style sheets are named user-agent style sheets The author of the Web page defines styles for the document. These are the most common style sheets The reader, the user of the browser, may have a custom style sheet to tailor its experience The user-agent is outside our control and it should stay that way. It's the...
When working on my piece about contrast I found myself writing about the CSS cascade. The more I realized I didn't understand the cascade itself. So this is my attempt at understanding the cascade, different types of style sheets and how they interact with each other. I'm also coming to the realization that this is one of the main issues that attract people to CSS in Javascript. The cascade is complicated and, sometimes, the interaction between user-agent and author style sheets can be a real PITA so any option that removes the cascade from the equation seems attractive. So rather...
Mavohttps://mavo.io/ is an extension to HTML created by Lea Verou as part of her work at MIT CSAIL. It caught my attention because it's a minimal setup system that does all of the heavy lifting for you as we'll see when we look at how it works and it can do fairly sophisticated projects. To test Mavo I will use it to create a project listing for a portfolio. It will test Mavo's storage capabilities, how to create multiple entries in a single application and Mavo scripting features built into the platform. What it is Mavo adds attributes to HTML...
Over time I've learned that performance is a two way street that requires good server configurations and good content management. You should avoid using .htaccess files completely if you have access to httpd main server config file. Using .htaccess files slows down your Apache http server. Any directive that you can include in a .htaccess file is better set in a Directory block, as it will have the same effect with better performance. Cross Origin Requests These rulles allow servers to work around the same-origin policyhttps://www.wikiwand.com/en/Same-originpolicy and accept resources origin This is not without risks as it opens your server...
Most languages that I've worked with have an additional tool for promises that covers items that we have to do at the end of a task, regardless of whether it succeeds or not. Using this example we'll explore uses for finally and compare with using async / await for the same task. fetchAndDisplay takes two parameters, a URL and the element you want to insert the content into. The original version does the following: - shows a loading spinner to indiccate the content is loading - Fetches the URL - If the fetch succeeds - Insert the text into the...
