The Conference
for Video Devs

October 24th - 25th, 2023
Terra Gallery, San Francisco

Catch up

The Demuxed mascot stands on a step stool with hammer in hand, facing a wall. On that wall, three ornate picture frames. In those frames, three pictures of three letters: I, P, and B, reminding us of video compression picture types

Why attend?

No marketing, ever.

Speakers are selected based on their submission, not how much money their company paid; we will never, ever sell a speaking slot. Attendee information isn't for sale either, and that includes any sponsors.
Affordable.

We want anyone in the industry to be able to come, which means keeping tickets reasonably priced (thanks largely to our generous sponsors). We also offer free and discounted tickets to students and open source contributors, so please reach out if you're interested.
For everyone in the community.

Our community is dedicated to providing an inclusive, enjoyable experience for everyone in the video industry. In this pursuit, and in keeping with our love for reasonable standards, we adopted the Ada Initiative's code of conduct.

A loading spinner at a buffet table, going back for seconds. Ha ha, get it, seconds?

Photos of the Terra Gallery and Event Venue

Venue and Location

Terra Gallery & Event Venue

511 Harrison St, San Francisco, CA 94105

Terra Gallery & Event Venue is a premiere San Francisco event venue. It is easily accessible via BART and Muni, in a pleasant and clean area of downtown.

But don't just take our word for it. According to one intrepid reviewer: "Terra G is very very clean, airy, well kept and maintained. The kitchen, restrooms and outside space are to my likening as well. Also love the neighborhood, and location is clean and and quiet." …so, it's got to be good.

Content Aware Encoding for low latency live streaming encoders using deep learning

Livestreaming has emerged as a captivating medium that is reshaping the way we engage, communicate, and entertain with the world. Platforms like Twitch, YouTube Live, Facebook Live and others have become go-to destinations for audiences seeking real-time experiences, immediate interaction, and the thrill of being part of a live event. Real-time transcoding plays a crucial role in delivering high-quality, compatible, and optimized video content to these audiences using a range of devices and platforms. Most of this transcoding today, occurs using a fixed adaptive bitrate (ABR) ladder that has a predetermined set of bitrate/resolution combinations for each encoded stream. This static or one size fits all approach has the following limitations: content type blindness leading to inefficient use of bandwidth and suboptimal video quality (VQ). To overcome these limitations, Netflix pioneered content aware encoding (or Per-Shot encoding) for VOD use case. The video content is analyzed offline for every shot and efficient encoding decisions such as bitrate, resolution, quantization level is chosen based on convex hull of a given shot (best quality-bitrate points obtained from an ocean of encodes with different parameters) to maximize the VQ while minimizing bandwidth requirements. Live streaming does not have the luxury of “infinite” latency that VOD offers. Real-time transcoding at scale puts additional cap on the processing capacity. This is a challenging problem that has attracted quite a bit of research in recent times. There are several approaches to content aware encoding for low latency encoding. Finding the best possible quality-bitrate trade-off in real-time with available compute while maintaining latency is the name of this game. In this talk, we showcase our work using deep learning (DL) that predicts the “optimal” bitrate for incoming video in real time using data from input and encoder lookahead. We train a fully connected regression network using input statistics (luma histogram) and encoder lookahead statistics (SAD, mv and activity histograms). The ground truth for our purpose of achieving “optimal” bitrate is the bitrate which achieves a minimum VMAF value of 90 (this is the minimum quality bar) for each chosen shot during training. This regression network is very light on compute and can efficiently run without affecting real-time performance or density of the encoder. This network needs a minimum of four frames of lookahead data to produce a high prediction accuracy. We have trained our network to have maximum savings for low complexity content with negligible loss in video quality and bypass very high complexity content. We tested this algorithm using a variety of video clips downloaded from Twitch.tv and here are some of our results: 1. Bitrate savings of more than 30% with < 1 VMAF point degradation for easy content such as talking head and low complexity content. 2. Bitrate savings of 9% on average for medium complexity content with < 1 VMAF point degradation. 3. Negligible savings for high complexity content (as the algorithm knows lowering bitrate would cause VQ degradation). The reasons for using a deep learning-based approach to predict CAE bitrate over traditional approaches are twofold: 1. Nonlinear function produced from DL provides precise bitrate savings without degrading VQ. 2. DL models can be trained/retrained by the content distributor using propriety and specific set to maximize bitrate savings while maintaining high VQ. This approach is applicable for both hardware and software-based encoders which have access to the encoder lookahead statistics mentioned above. These bitrate savings can provide substantial savings on CDN bandwidth and storage costs for content distributors.

Using application informed pacing to smooth video traffic and be a friendly internet neighbor

On-demand streaming video traffic is managed by an adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithm whose job is to optimize quality of experience (QoE) for a single video session. ABR algorithms leave the question of sharing network resources up to transport-layer algorithms. TCP is the most widely used transport protocol for streaming video and it is known to send packets in bursts. Traditionally TCP algorithms have focussed on controlling the number of unacknowledged bytes-in-flight at any given time. The process for releasing new bytes typically leads to very bursty traffic on-the-wire. Such burstiness can overload a path’s bottlenecks, leading to excess packet loss, building up queues in network routers, causing excessive delay. This behavior is problematic not only to the video traffic itself, but also to all traffic sharing the same bottleneck link. Additionally, the burstiness causes packets to arrive at clients in bursts, leading to CPU spikes and causing interruptions on CPU-constraint clients. Pacing can help smooth out the burstiness by spreading packet emissions over a period of time while achieving a target sending rate. This gives precise control over the timing of packet emission on-the-wire during per-chunk retrieval on individual TCP connections. Pacing has been around for a while with the first reference around 1991 and the wider TCP community has observed performance benefits from such precise control. In this presentation, we will introduce application-informed pacing, which allows ABR algorithms to set a target pace rate. This rate is decided by the application based on client needs, relayed to the server and it acts as an upper limit on packet-by-packet send rates. We will also propose a joint ABR and rate-control scheme, called Sammy, which selects both video quality and pacing rates. With these two strategies, we will demonstrate that we can substantially smooth video traffic to improve its interactions with the rest of the internet, while maintaining the same QoE for streaming video. We implement our scheme and evaluate it at Netflix. We will show that with no compromise to the streaming QoE, we can improve both retransmissions and RTTs in comparison to existing, extensively tested and tuned production ABR algorithms. Our approach smoothes video, making it a more friendly neighbor to other internet applications.

The Bug Hunter's Guide: Unraveling Video Players CMCD implementation in a month

[(This is a fine tunning of a talk named: How we were able to create a tool for the video dev community in a month that found bugs in major video players.)] At Qualabs we hosted Monte<Video> Summer camp this february, it was a community event focused on connection ("CONNECTING THROUGH THE POWER OF COLLABORATION"). We wanted other video devs to join us in our offices in Montevideo, to experience our culture, our summer, our offices, and why not, create something together. So we asked the community, what ideas are interesting for us to build? What do we need? We had two very interesting proposals: Will Law from Akamai proposed a CMCD Validator tool that could help developers adopt the standard easily. Marco Vidonis from Nimble ape proposed to create an open source hybrid meetup platform. These projects would be publicly available to everyone who would want to join, develop and learn in the process. Everything about the management of the project would also be public and we would have in person meetings when possible. The focus of this talk is on the CMCD Validator project since in that month of work, we were able to create a tool that would enable any video developer to use as part of their development flow to incorporate the CMCD standard on the players. Also it would allow us to test any existing implementation of CMCD in the players. We found interesting things: Reported CMCD implementation bugs on: Dash.js Bitmovin Shaka player We proposed changes on the CMCD standard to clear ambiguity. After the summer camp ended, we kept gathering ideas and optimizations to add to the tool. We kept working on it, now it is able to start analyzing differences between how players handle the different parameters, it has its own analyzer tool integrated with elastic and Kibana and can be used as a "proxy" to be able to capture information from mobile devices. We also used it to build a CMCD course for SVTA, using the tool to generate examples and showcase good practices. But, what is in it for the devs? The creation of this tool was a great way to involve our developers more into the community. By hosting this event, the devs involved had to be aware of what the community liked, how to ask for their feedback, and how to report bugs on the players with the right information, and how to make the life of other devs easier. They also learned a lot about specifics for the CMCD standard and how important it is in the ecosystem improving their skills. For closing this talk, we also want to talk about how we can make this a muscle. We definitely want to be able to create more tools/code in the next iterations of the Monte<video> Summer camp. Can we keep creating these in other spaces? Can we start showing the power of the community in all our community events? What more can we create?

Our Speakers

Adam Wieckowski

Fraunhofer
Alvaro Laserna Lopez

TestDevLab
Amy Prosser

Optus Sport
Andrey Norkin

Netflix
Andrey Pozdnyakov

Elecard
Andy Francis

Bitmovin
Eric Tang

Livepeer
Guillem Cabrera

Brightcove
Jean-Baptiste Kempf

VideoLAN
Jeremy Doig
Jon Kurinsky

Tubi
Jordi Cenzano

Meta
Josselin Cozanet

Ateme
Justin Sanford

Mux
Kevin Yu

Pluto TV
Kieran Kunhya

Open Broadcast Systems
Luke McGartland

Sequence

Matt Szatmary

Mux
Mattias Buelens

TheoPlayer
Mike English
Nicolas Gonzalez

Qualabs
Pieter-Jan Speelmans

THEOplayer
Prabhu Hosur

Pluto TV
Quentin Mazars-Simon

Vimeo
Ramdas Satyan

AMD
Ronald S. Bultje

Two Orioles
Shravya Kunamalla

Netflix
Spencer Shanson

Pluto TV
Thasso Griebel

castLabs
Todd Sharp

Twitch
Tomas Bacik

CDN77
Vanessa Pyne

Daily
Victoria Nemiah

Mux
Willy R. Vasquez

University of Texas

The Schedule

Tuesday 9:30 - 9:45 PDT

Opening Remarks

Matt McClure
Tuesday 9:45 - 10:15 PDT

Jeremy Doig
Tuesday 10:15 - 10:30 PDT

Amy Prosser

Optus Sport
Tuesday 10:30 - 11:00 PDT

Break
Tuesday 11:00 - 11:25 PDT

Pieter-Jan Speelmans

THEOplayer
Tuesday 11:25 - 11:40 PDT

Adam Wieckowski

Fraunhofer
Tuesday 11:40 - 12:05 PDT

Todd Sharp

Twitch
Tuesday 12:05 - 12:20 PDT

Kieran Kunhya

Open Broadcast Systems
Tuesday 12:20 - 13:20 PDT

Lunch, sponsored by:
Tuesday 13:20 - 13:35 PDT

Mike English
Tuesday 13:35 - 14:00 PDT

Kevin Yu

Pluto TV

Prabhu Hosur

Pluto TV

Spencer Shanson

Pluto TV
Tuesday 14:00 - 14:15 PDT

Andy Francis

Bitmovin
Tuesday 14:15 - 14:40 PDT

Tomas Bacik

CDN77
Tuesday 14:40 - 15:10 PDT

Break
Tuesday 15:10 - 15:35 PDT

Shravya Kunamalla

Netflix
Tuesday 15:35 - 15:50 PDT

Ronald S. Bultje

Two Orioles
Tuesday 15:50 - 16:15 PDT

Victoria Nemiah

Mux
Tuesday 16:15 - 16:45 PDT

Break
Tuesday 16:45 - 17:10 PDT

Josselin Cozanet

Ateme
Tuesday 17:10 - 17:25 PDT

Mattias Buelens

TheoPlayer
Tuesday 17:25 - 17:40 PDT

Thasso Griebel

castLabs
Tuesday 17:40 - 18:05 PDT

Quentin Mazars-Simon

Vimeo

Wednesday 8:00 - 9:00 PDT

Women and Enby Breakfast

RSVP now!
If you like free breakfast and great company, join us for a community-organized networking breakfast -- all who identify as women, non-binary folks, and/or trans folks are welcome. We'll dive into a mix of topics, so bring your Qs & As!
Wednesday 9:30 - 9:55 PDT

Andrey Norkin

Netflix
Wednesday 9:55 - 10:10 PDT

Willy R. Vasquez

University of Texas
Wednesday 10:10 - 10:35 PDT

Nicolas Gonzalez

Qualabs
Wednesday 10:35 - 10:50 PDT

Alvaro Laserna Lopez

TestDevLab
Wednesday 10:50 - 11:20 PDT

Break
Wednesday 11:20 - 11:45 PDT

Matt Szatmary

Mux
Wednesday 11:45 - 12:00 PDT

Vanessa Pyne

Daily
Wednesday 12:00 - 12:25 PDT

Ramdas Satyan

AMD
Wednesday 12:25 - 12:40 PDT

Eric Tang

Livepeer
Wednesday 12:40 - 13:40 PDT

Lunch, sponsored by:
Wednesday 13:40 - 14:25 PDT

Lightning Talks

Submit a Lightning Talk
Hard cap of 3 minutes, ordering will be announced the afternoon of the 24th.
Wednesday 14:25 - 14:55 PDT

Break
Wednesday 14:55 - 15:10 PDT

Jean-Baptiste Kempf

VideoLAN
Wednesday 15:10 - 15:25 PDT

Luke McGartland

Sequence
Wednesday 15:25 - 15:50 PDT

Andrey Pozdnyakov

Elecard
Wednesday 15:50 - 16:05 PDT

Guillem Cabrera

Brightcove
Wednesday 16:05 - 16:35 PDT

Break
Wednesday 16:35 - 16:50 PDT

Justin Sanford

Mux
Wednesday 16:50 - 17:15 PDT

Jordi Cenzano

Meta
Wednesday 17:15 - 17:35 PDT

Surprise
Wednesday 17:35 - 17:40 PDT

Closing Remarks

Matt McClure
Wednesday 17:40 - 21:00 PDT

After Party

After 2 long days of talks, we'll head all the way to...the downstairs of the venue! Put your feet up, grab some refreshments, and hang out with your fellow video engineers. Sponsored by:

A row of pictures of speakers at the Demuxed conference. The speakers look intelligent, dynamic, and occasionally funny. Seems like a good crowd.

About us

Demuxed is video engineers talking about video technology. Our first meeting was a single day event back in 2015, born out of the SF Video Technology meetup. The video industry had plenty of trade shows and other opportunities for The Business, but our goal was to create a conference and community for the engineers building the technology powering video, from encoding, to delivery, to playback, and beyond. We've grown a lot since then, but our goal remains the same.

After creating Demuxed, some of the organizers went on to start and work at Mux. Mux continues to sponsor most of the organizational work behind the scenes (thanks for the salary!), but Demuxed is, at its core, a community-led event.

Every year we get a group together that's kind enough to do things like schedule planning, help brainstorm cool swag, and, most importantly, argue heatedly over which talk submissions should make the final cut. These folks are the ones hanging out in Video Dev Slack, and they hail from all over the industry.

The Demuxed mascot stares on in confusion as a machine called Demu-GPT spits out new anthropomorphic mascots according to its prompt, 'create tv character'. The mascots travel down a conveyor belt, immediately into a trash bin

A row of photos from the Demuxed conference, showing large crowds, interesting speakers, and folks just living their best video dev life.

The Conference for Video Devs

October 24th - 25th, 2023 Terra Gallery, San Francisco

Why attend?

No marketing, ever.

Affordable.

For everyone in the community.

Venue and Location

Terra Gallery & Event Venue

511 Harrison St, San Francisco, CA 94105

Our Speakers

Adam Wieckowski

Fraunhofer

Alvaro Laserna Lopez

TestDevLab

Amy Prosser

Optus Sport

Andrey Norkin

Netflix

Andrey Pozdnyakov

Elecard

Andy Francis

Bitmovin

Eric Tang

Livepeer

Guillem Cabrera

Brightcove

Jean-Baptiste Kempf

VideoLAN

Jeremy Doig

Jon Kurinsky

Tubi

Jordi Cenzano

Meta

Josselin Cozanet

Ateme

Justin Sanford

Mux

Kevin Yu

Pluto TV

Kieran Kunhya

Open Broadcast Systems

Luke McGartland

Sequence

Matt Szatmary

Mux

Mattias Buelens

TheoPlayer

Mike English

The Conference
for Video Devs

October 24th - 25th, 2023
Terra Gallery, San Francisco