September 2024: Demuxed is next month and WinAmp is back baby

Yep, once you start counting it in weeks out instead of months is when the panic joy and anticipation really sets in for an organizer. Just a logistical note: we aim to send ~13 emails per year, so one per month and then an extra one the month of Demuxed, so you'll be hearing from us again in a couple of weeks!

Some of us are coming off of a delightful trip to Amsterdam for IBC. I think people think I'm being sarcastic when I say that I genuinely enjoy IBC, which is fair, because it's a trade show, but it's a good one! Amsterdam is a beautiful city, and folks at the show generally seem to be having a pretty good time. It's good vibes, which is extremely rare for a trade show!

Demuxed 2024

Again, 3 weeks out. That's not a large number of weeks! As we enter the home stretch here, now's the time to:

• Let us know if your company wants to host a happy hour! We do them on the first night (that will be Wednesday the 16th), and it's always great to have a few options for attendees to choose between. All you need to do is let us know where/when, and give us an RSVP page (if you want). We'll put it on a list for attendees. They're a ton of fun, and a great way to support the event!
• If you want to give a lightning talk, submit one! We've got a lot of pre-confirmed talks this year, so we're hoping to finalize the list early in day 1 vs the morning of day 2, so submit earlier than usual if you're interested.

We're really proud of how the event is coming together. The submissions were excellent, which meant we were able to create an awesome schedule. Our colleague, Dar, then went way over the top with building our most interesting/interactive website ever. We got off the phone with the special guest earlier and that's going to be a ton of fun too.

We do have a couple of sponsorship slots left available, including the post-Demuxed party! If you want to make sure there's lots of food and drinks at the after-party, you should definitely grab that sponsorship slot, because right now Matt and Phil are bringing a six-pack of La Croix and Bud Light for everyone to share!

But…most importantly, go get your tickets if you haven't already! Be kind, rewind forward this email along to your colleagues!

SF Video Week

We've covered this in a couple newsletters, so I'll be brief. There are other industry events that happen around Demuxed. They're great, and also smaller and require participation, so we don't link to them directly and let folks that are interested seek them out.

• October 14th (Monday) - FOMS
• October 15th (Tuesday) - HLS Interest Group
• October 16th (Wednesday) - Just another plug for those happy hours/open offices that you should email us about hosting.

Wide World of Video

🦙 The pre-this-Internet's favorite desktop multimedia player is now open source source available. The code release hasn't been without issues, including a license that blocks forking (??) and proprietary code. Still…WinAmp is an amazing piece of computing nostalgia for a generation, and it's pretty cool to see it (potentially) getting some love.

🎞️ This one opens up on a sad note: developer leaves a job they like, joins a startup, then loses the new job. BUT, they take the chance to explore building an AI video editor for the next year. The writeup goes pretty deep into the journey, and includes some fun side quests along the way.

🤖 Alibaba Cloud recently released over a hundred open source AI models, including updates to its text-to-video models.

🦋 Bluesky, the social media startup whose selling point is Twitter-but-not-X, recently announced native video support. It launched as invite only and was one of the hottest tickets in the tech world for a little bit. Things seemed to cool, but given X's recent stumbles they've started racking up growth again, including a whooole lotta Brazilian content.

🗞️ The FTC recently discovered that large social media and streaming platforms collect a lot of data, don't have great privacy controls, and don't seem to really have a ton of safeguards in place for the youth. Welcome to the conversation, FTC.

📺 The media industry hasn't had a great run in the business press the last couple of years. It's a bumpy road out there, and Paramount Global's announcement of a phase 2 of layoffs is another painful reminder of it.

🦅 FFmpeg is now flexing Vulkan for H.265 encoding—because who doesn't want faster, fancier video compression with GPU acceleration? Why is the emoji for this one a bird of prey? You'll have to listen to the upcoming episode of the Demuxed podcast to find out.

🪗 A YouTuber dives into JPEG XL vs AVIF via a thorough test on a single HD image. It's only an ~8 minute video, so it can only go so deep, but it's a fun watch.

🩳 I showed up to Heff's talk at IBC to support my friend, since most of those sessions (at least that I've been to) have been uh…light on attendance. Not the case this time, though, it seems like folks were interested in a discussion on optimizing for short-form video content and it was slammed. Credit to Phil, it was originally his session and he gave a similar one at SF Video a few months ago.

Upcoming Meetups/Community Events

10/3 - MonteVIDEO Tech Meetup
10/3 - PDX Video Tech
10/10 - Video Tech NYC
10/14 - FOMS
10/15 - HLS Interest Group
10/16-17 - Demuxed