March 2025: Important Demuxed 2025 details are here. Also there's an NAB meetup.

Hey everyone, Phil coming at you with the latest newsletter, so expect a bit more pre-amble ramble this time round. Scroll down to the bottom of this section if you don't care about the story.

On stage last year, Matt alluded to us making some changes for Demuxed 2025, saying "Things will be different in 2025", but stayed close lipped on what they would be. "Why haven't they announced anything about Demuxed yet?!" I hear you fretting. "Is it even happening?".

This probably won't be a shock to you, but Matt didn't really know, and neither did I. Here's the thing: Matt and I are pretty busy people, and believe it or not, Demuxed isn't our full time job - we both have day jobs too at Mux, with expectations that don't go away just because Demuxed is happening. It turns out Matt also has 2 4 kids (congrats on the twins, Matt 🎉). I have a cat (which I am assured is the same thing 🐈‍⬛).

When we started Demuxed 10 years ago, it was a Club 93, Racer 5 IPA fueled passion project, we crammed 128 people in the Crunchyroll office for one day - the logistics were pretty simple (burritos for lunch). By 2019, we'd grown to 750 people in the Midway. Since the pandemic, we've been slowly rebuilding, back up to 550 people in the wonderful Regency Ballroom for two days last year.

Putting on a Demuxed is exhausting in the run-up to the event with Matt, Victoria, Walker, and I working (quite literally) every waking hour in the last few weeks before the event. While Matt and I both get a huge amount of reward and energy in the moment at the event, we're admittedly pretty broken in the run up, and the immediate aftermath.

Matt and I both took long breaks over Christmas and the start of 2025. Mine was a mini-sabatical where I spent most of my time soul searching and doing crosswords while drinking cava on the Spanish coast, while Matt became twice the father he used to be (for the second time). Since we got back we have been pondering what's next for Demuxed.

Here's how Demuxed is going to change in 2025

1. Demuxed 2025 will be in London in October. Going forward, we're planning to alternate between SF and London, so Demuxed 2026 will be back in SF. Not only will this really help Matt and I balance the load more fairly on both ends in alternating years, it lets us bring Demuxed closer to Europe's superb pool of video engineers at a time when travel budgets are tighter than they have been in a long time.
2. Given that split, we're expecting the conference to get a little smaller more exclusive over the coming years - probably closer to a 300-400 person event. This gives us much more flexibility with venue options, especially in SF, and reduces our planning overhead, but it also lets us focus on Demuxed's roots as a deeply technical conference for Video Engineers.
3. We're going to be using more external help to aid with the boring logistics bits like venues, sponsors, signage, and food, so Matt and I can focus on amazing content and "vibes"... and who doesn't love Demuxed's vibes?
4. We'll continue to invest in helping video tech meetups get off the ground (👋🏻 Midwest Video Tech Meetup, hope you enjoyed your 🍕 and 🍻). Don't forget if you're trying to get a meeup off the ground, reach out, and we'd love to sponsor your first event.
5. We'll continue to invest in hosting Demuxed events around other industry events like NAB and the meta-meetup at IBC. Know some other events you think we should host something at? Let us know.

Here's how you can get involved with Demuxed this year:

• Definitely in for Demuxed 2025 in London? Drop your email address in this form, just to give us an idea of numbers!
• If you're super excited about sponsoring now that we're on your side of the pond? Let us know and we'll send you the sponsorship prospectus as soon as it's ready!

Demuxed Meetup @ NAB

Speaking of NAB, great news, the Demuxed meetup at NAB is happening again this year! Same time (19:00, on Tuesday the 8th), same place (Millenium Fandom). We hope you'll join us, please be sure to RSVP on Luma as space is limited!

Wide World of Video

A bumper set this month, because we've been a little lax on sending newsletters since Demuxed 2024… sorry about that!

Apple Vision Pro: Blink and You'll Miss It. Rumor has it Apple's already eyeing the exit for the Vision Pro, possibly killing production by the end of 2024. Turns out, $3,500 face computers aren't flying off shelves—but don't worry, a cheaper version might be coming to soothe your FOMO.

While we're talking about the Vision Pro, Blackmagic is building a 3D camera just for Apple's Vision Pro, because apparently we're all directors in the metaverse now. Spatial video content is about to get a serious cinematic glow-up.

WASM Audio Decoders: Play Anything, Anywhere. Want to play obscure audio formats like it's 2003 again? This GitHub repo brings old-school codecs to the modern browser with WebAssembly wizardry. ATRAC9? RealAudio? No problem. Because nostalgia deserves playback too.

JPEG Tsunami: When Glitch Becomes Art. This wild tool weaponizes JPEG compression to create hypnotic, glitchy wave animations from images. It's like your photo got sucked into a digital riptide—and came out fabulous.

WebSockets & $1M Later: Real-Time Video, Real Expensive. Recall.ai runs real-time transcription across Zoom, Meet, and more—aka a mountain of WebSocket connections. One small oversight in connection handling led to a $1 million AWS bill. It's a brutal lesson in how video infra at scale can quietly drain your wallet while you sleep.

LivePortrait: Compression Gymnastics. Ever wanted your face to live on as a low-bitrate, animated avatar? LivePortrait pulls it off with a mind-bending codec built for real-time expression streaming. It's uncanny valley meets bandwidth frugality.

Vintage Digicams Are the New Film. Your old Canon PowerShot is now a coveted aesthetic weapon. Gen Z is ditching hyper-polished iPhone pics for the crunchy charm of early-2000s digital cams—grainy, blurry, and somehow authentic.

VidFormer: AI Video Editing, No Hands Required. This open-source toolkit gives your video workflow an AI brain—automatically reframing, segmenting, and stylizing footage like a caffeinated editor who never sleeps. Just add footage and vibe.

Nokia's Video Manifesto. Nokia's here to remind us that video is in their DNA—and in their patent portfolio. “Yeah, but we already pay MPEG-LA,” you might be saying to yourself, but you'd be wrong, friend, because they're outie 5000 on that. We don't really know how to search for patent owners, but we're going to choose to believe that these various folding chair/table patents are the author's inventions. It's basically just the physical form of video compression, same same.

Convex Hulls & Bitrate Ladders: The Unsung Heroes of Streaming. Think streaming is all about flashy interfaces? Think again. This ACM paper dives into the nitty-gritty of constructing bitrate ladders using convex hull prediction methods. It's the behind-the-scenes math magic that ensures your cat videos don't buffer—because nobody's got time for that.

pfSense vs. YouTube Ads: Ad Blockers, But Make It Hardcore. Tired of ads slipping past your blockers? This walkthrough shows how to use pfSense and a MITM proxy to actually decrypt encrypted ad traffic from YouTube and friends. It's deep packet inspection for people who take “no ads” very, very personally.

Upcoming Meetups/Community Events

02/25 - London Video Tech

02/25 - Kitchener-Waterloo Video Technology

03/01 - Paris Video Tech

04/08 - Demuxed @ NAB