“Quality” is one of the most abused and overloaded terms in video. Orwell says that unclear language leads to unclear thinking, and: wow, our industry suffers from unclear thinking around quality. We conflate codecs like AV1 with “high quality”; we don’t know the difference between QoS and QoE; we’re 👍 on VMAF but we don’t really know how to use it. Meanwhile, Strobe gets on stage at Demuxed 2018 and says “Video quality doesn’t matter” (as the audience gasps in horror).

In this talk, we’ll bring clarity and precision to the domain of “video quality.” We’ll learn the difference between QoE, QoS, perceptual quality, fidelity, efficiency, and more. We will review a schema that once and for all will eliminate all confusion, doubt, and ignorance from this area, driving our industry forward into a more enlightened future. And most importantly, we’ll learn whether Strobe was right and wrong when he said quality didn’t matter. This talk was presented at Demuxed 2024, a conference by and for engineers working in video. Every year we host a conference with lots of great new talks like this in San Francisco. Learn more at https://demuxed.com