March 2016 - Streaming Video Blog

Interlace video example before deinterlacing

Have you ever seen video content that looks like the image above, but weren’t sure of the cause? These overt horizontal lines, appearing as pixelation around movement like out of an old school Atari game, are an artifact created from presenting an interlaced source in a progressive format.

This article explains what is interlaced video content and which sources, such as analogue cameras, can produce this type of video content on live streams. It then goes over deinterlacing techniques to remove this artifact and how to easily enable it on the encoder side… and why you wouldn’t want to use deinterlacing on content that is already progressive. If you, however, are familiar with deinterlacing and are looking to upgrade your equipment to avoid this issue instead, please reference our Video Studio Recommendations white paper.

Keyframes, InterFrame & Video Compression

The default mental image of video compression involves unwanted video artifacts, like pixelation and blockiness in the image. This sells short, though, the complexity that actually goes into compressing video content. In particular, it overlooks a fascinating process called interframe, which involves keyframes and delta frames to intelligently compress content in a manner that is intended to go unnoticed.

This article describes this process in detail, while also giving best practices and ideal encoder settings that you can apply to your live streaming at IBM Cloud Video. Much of this specific advice relates to streaming due to adaptive bitrates. To learn more about that technology, reference our How Adaptive Streaming Solves Viewer Bandwidth Issues white paper.