March 2024: Hey look, you can submit talks for Demuxed '24 now! More piracy stuff is in the news, and also, shockingly, AI.

The end of March / beginning of April is always such a stressful time to send out a newsletter. It's hyperbolic to say these newsletters are backbreaking work or anything but…writing is hard, and man, there's about a week long period there where no one can be trusted. A certain Demuxed speaker told everyone at Mux that the Bureau of Land Management was asking us to “inventory the number of 'streams' encompassed by our properties” and that everyone would need to fill out a very involved attestation because we couldn't correct the misunderstanding in time.

A lot of people were had.

So, anyway, I almost accidentally sent this on April Fools and would have died if I'd gotten messages being like “haha talk submissions are open now, almost had me!” 🫠

Demuxed 2024

But nay, it is not a joke, Demuxed 2024 talk submissions are open! “What?! April just started,” you mumble to yourself. “It can't possibly be that time of year yet.”

But yes, it is that time of year. As we will reiterate ad nauseam until late October, this is the 10th Demuxed and we have big plans. Those big plans also require us to get things in order a little earlier than the last couple of years, so everyone put your speaker hat on and get cranking.

Those big plans also, shockingly, require money earlier in the process than usual, so we're hoping to get sponsors on board early! We're sending out the sponsor prospectus in the coming days, so email us to get added to the list.

Oh we're at the cosplay bar again at NAB

If you're looking to get off strip and hang out with the Demuxed crowd, we'll be at Millennium Fandom again. It's currently got a waiting list, but if you reach out in #demuxed on Video Dev someone can probably get you in.

The Wide World of Video

🐧 Everyone likes to wax nostalgic about the “good ol' days” of whatever thing currently sucks because of [The Kids|capitalism|algorithms|humans, generally], but Andrea's video about using FFMPEG on Linux really did capture something amazing about YouTube before The Clout took over. I'm going to be so heartbroken if someone responds to this email and tells me that this is all a shtick and I've been had. Let us have this.

🎞️ The IEEE will no longer accept papers that include Lenna. That photo is singlehandedly responsible for us initially starting to do slide review at Demuxed (look, it's a good idea anyway) and it's still snuck in as a late slide edit after review. A lot of women in video are over it, Lena herself is asking to retire it, and if you're thinking of a reason why people should keep using the photo: the rest of us are all begging you, please don't die on this hill.

🔌 Sorry, Linux users, apparently the High Definition Multimedia Illuminati (aka, HDMI Forum) told AMD they're not allowed to make an open source driver for HDMI 2.1. No one seems to have a confirmed reason why, but the implication is something about piracy, which would be an objectively funny reason for them to block this in 2024. Whatever, you were probably using DisplayPort anyway.

🏴‍☠️ Speaking of piracy, some film companies went after a Redditor's identity/torrent history. The actual target wasn't the individual, but rather RCN, a New Jersey-based ISP, because the Redditor posted something about “emails” (copyright warnings/notices?) being “useless” and that RCN never did anything about them. Reddit declined to honor the subpoena, but ultimately did hand over the user's IP address since it was an ISP that was actually the topic of discussion.

🦾 The Xiph gang released Opus 1.5. There's a lot packed in there, but one of the core features in the release is how they're using machine learning and deep neural nets for better packet loss concealment. If those words don't mean anything to you, the tl;dr is that codecs already try to mask when bits of audio don't make it, but Skynet can mask it better.

💰 “Wait, what?” - everyone when they saw someone else post the news about Nikon acquiring RED. It's a pretty dramatic entrance into the video industry for Nikon, and the RED Nikon booth is going to be poppin' at NAB in a couple of weeks.

📪 Ronald Bultje and John Luther, two community members that need no introduction, put together a 5 day email course for folks that want to implement AV1 in their processing workflows.

🤖 YouTube is rolling out features that identify altered or synthetic content. The announcement says things in a couple of different ways: they're “helping artists disclose” AI content by “requiring creators to disclose” that content. Either way, theoretically you should be able to more easily tell that it was not, in fact, Will Smith eating all that spaghetti.

Upcoming meetups/community events

4/4 - Seattle Video Tech

4/17 - Demuxed @ NAB

4/17 - Cloud Native Media

4/23 - Kitchener-Waterloo Video Technology

4/26 - SF Video Technology

6/12 - Berlin Video