August 2024: The 2024 schedule is live and the Internet has another "what is blue, even" scandal

We're less than 2 months out from The Big One Zero 🎂. The good news is that everything is entirely done at this point and we're coasting through to a successful event together.

Jk there's a mountain of work left, but it's mostly exciting stuff!

Between now and Demuxed '24, some of us will be traveling to Amsterdam for IBC. Every evening there will be countless booths on a trade show floor giving away any beer you want as long as it's Heineken. What more could someone ask for except, perhaps, a good beer (duikt).

Speaking of IBC… The IBC meta-meetup is back! The Barcelona, London, Madrid and Paris Video Tech communities are hosting a little get-together at TAPZUID on the Saturday night during IBC. While tragically Phil will be drinking cocktails on a beach in Rhodes during IBC, there are strong rumors that Matt himself has promised to make a guest appearance!

Demuxed 2024

The big news is that the schedule is officially online. Go forth and start carefully making your own calendar to hit your favorite talks (and moving retro windows around and resizing them for reasons). But no, everyone coming to the event always makes sure to be back from every break in time for every talk, RIGHT?!

We are doing something a little different this year, though. Instead of specific time slots for each talk, we're doing scheduled blocks. We've got buffer built into the blocks to make sure we've got time for Q&A and other fun stuff that inevitably comes up in a live event.

As always, if you're thinking about coming, grab your ticket soon! We've got more space this year and still expect to sell out, but either way, it (selfishly) makes our logistics way easier when we've got a bulk of the ticket holders early for things like badge printing, food ordering, etc, and your ticket is cheaper if you get it before the iframes sell out.

If you're interested in supporting the event via a sponsorship, reach out! We're sold out of all of the spots that include a physical booth at the event, but there are still other interesting opportunities.

SF Video Week (and stuff)

As has been tradition for years, the week of Demuxed includes a bunch of other great video industry events around the Bay. As a newsletter connoisseur like yourself that reads every word of every edition, you're probably sick of this spiel, but: we don't link directly to these events. They're smaller and need the group to participate, but if you're interested you should take part!

• October 14th (Monday) - Foundations of Open Media Standards and Software, aka FOMS. It's a participant-led un-conference and developer workshop, and truly an industry gem of an event.
• October 15th (Tuesday) - HLS Interest Group. A meeting of industry practitioners to hear the latest from Apple, identify key industry pain points as they pertain to HTTP Live Streaming, and discuss potential solutions.

Also, not that week, but still deserves a bonus shoutout: MonteVIDEO summer camp at the end of January next year.

Wide World of Video

💙I remember a childhood existential crisis: “what if the color I call blue, you call red.” Turns out that doesn't make a ton of sense, but apparently on the edges of colors it totally does. You can take a quiz that says how wrong you are when you say green things are blue. It's not like the dress at all, but I want to believe it is.

🤔 You know those blog posts that make you think “this is absolutely ridiculous who would possibly do this” but also “I desperately wish it was me that had this intrusive thought and actually wrote too much code to nerd snipe fools.” Ok good, glad we're on the same page: now can you convert a video to pure CSS?

🚨 Turns out, not only is real-time video absurdly difficult but it also comes with a big stack o' code. Signal is the gold standard in security circles, but handling that stack comes with its own issues, including, apparently, RCEs.

♻️ There are few companies out there that do things on the Internet at Meta's scale, so when they talk about how they managed to “decrease Instagram's basic compute time by 94%”, a lot of dollar signs start showing up.

📺 The first Chromecast was truly a revolutionary device. Don't worry about an entire new device, just plug this sucker into your HDMI port. Unfortunately, Chromecast has been declared ‘end of life', which really just means “rebranded as Google TV Streamer.” Anyway, here's a history of Chromecast.

🫥 You know what's fun? Matching a video background to the surrounding video color. You know what's more fun? Video with transparency.

🔐 Talking about DRM is a little scary, because people have opinions about DRM. Talking about DRM getting cracked is even scarier, because people with those opinions also have lawyers. Luckily, nothing in this DeCENC project technically involves DRM, but the Phrack writeup is great. If you're into that sort of thing.

🤖 Unsupervised learning is the kind of thing parents worry happens at school. In today's internet, it's apparently a good thing. Try to keep up.

Upcoming Meetups/Community Events

9/11 - Sydney Video Technology
9/14 - IBC Meta Meetup
9/24 - Kitchener-Waterloo Video Technology
9/26 - SF Video Technology
10/14 - FOMS
10/15 - HLS Interest Group
10/16-17 - Demuxed