April 28, 2019, a phone call wakes me in the middle of the night: “TheLong Night”, a new episode of the final season of Game of Thrones is airing, but nothing is visible! The artistic intent is clearly extreme, and the encoding can’t handle it, resulting in a flurry of confused silhouettes in the darkness, struggling in a dark sea of banding. In this presentation, I will talk about how we resolved an extreme situation for an high quality streaming service by manually customizing encoding to mitigate the problem, inspired by well-known principles in the world of audio processing and 3D game rendering.

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