FOMS and Demuxed 2017 Report Back
The FOMS workshop and demuxed conference took place here in San Francisco last week. Ellation was proud to host FOMS workshop here in our SF offices and participate in the Demuxed conference that took place the day after Broadway Studios.
The FOMS workshop is organized as an un-conference where topics are decided upon in during the workshop. Participating companies included broad representation from browser, service providers and publishers.
During the workshop all the participants share what they are working on and the engineering standards, challenges and opportunities to make video experince better for our users. This year topics ranged from adaptive streaming strategies, low latency live streaming, content protection, container formats, browser autoPlay polices, open codecs, captions, video accessibility how AI tools are affecting video workflows and more. You can see detailed notes from many of these sessions linked to from the FOMS workshop schedule. Interesting new ideas around adaptive streaming quality annotation, improvements to communications around autoPlay policy, state of the art segment based low latency live streaming and much more were discussed.
This year at FOMS we broke up the workshop sessions with short presentations from participants which was a welcomed addition to the workshop structure. Topics ranged from a newly announced vlc.js that supported playback of many video codecs in the web browser, updates on CTA video quality metrics, Matroska standardization and more.
After two days of intense video engineering workshops, it was on to Demuxed, which impressed with a solid lineup of talks this year around the state of the art of video engineering. Some highlights:
- “S-Frame in AV1” by Tarek Amara from Twitch for short segments for low latency live streaming with non-GOP aligned segments for fast quality switching
- Megha Manohara from Netflix’s talk on 250Kbs encodes was also impressive to see what has been achieved with a relatively small data envelope with contemporary codecs
- Steven Robertson’s from YouTube visualization of adaptive streaming were illustrative towards accessing adaptive streaming performance.
- HDR talk by Mark Watson from Netflix highlighted the promise of HDR for OTT, however the HDR technology is still quite segmented and possibly is craving for consolidation for wider adoption and distribution.
For a more complete write up of the talks see Jan Ozer’s article on streaming media.
Overall two great events on video engineering, kudos to Matt McClure and Mux team for the Demuxed event and thanks to Silvia Pfeiffer and our FOMS sponsors ( Google, BitMoving and Ellation ) towards the FOMS workshop.
Ellation is hiring please reach out if you're interested, thanks for reading and keep an eye out for future video engineering updates in this space.
