Best Zhi Li Podcasts (2024)

1
TVV EP 23 - Adventures with AV1 for RTC with Eric Sun 1:22:44

4M ago1:22:44

1:22:44

In this episode, Eric Sun gives a deep dive into Meta's recent experiences with deploying AV1 for real-time communications across Meta's applications. He describes what proved to be the big advantages of AV1, where Meta saw most benefit in terms of user experience and how Meta demonstrated improved engagement from better video quality, and the prac…

1
TVV EP 22 - Playback experience in YouTube by Chas Mastin 52:07

4M ago52:07

52:07

In this episode, Chas Mastin shared his insights about how YouTube ensures premium playback experience for its users. As one of the largest streaming platforms globally, YouTube faces the challenge of delivering supreme experiences to millions of concurrent users and playback sessions from around the world. Chas discusses the technical challenges i…

1
TVV EP 21 - Live Captions In All Languages is Hard! Wait, is it really? 57:07

9M ago57:07

57:07

Live Captions are Hard! Wait, are they? Browse on over to the latest episode of The Video Verse where we discuss accessibility via Live Captions and Dubbing with Chris Zhang, Senior Solutions Architect at AWS, and Gio Galvez, VP of Business Development at SyncWords. We discuss a bit of history, then move onto the current state of things, followed b…

1
TVV EP 20 - Demystifying VMAF with Zhi Li 1:05:03

10M ago1:05:03

1:05:03

The VMAF video quality metric is ubiquitous in the streaming world, and any discussion of video codec performance is seldom complete without poring over VMAFscores. But what is it? In this episode VMAF guru and leader of the Netflix Video Codecs and Quality team joins us to delve into the mysteries of the metric. How did it originate and why was it…

1
TVV EP 19 - Exploring Versatile Video Coding 58:43

10M ago58:43

58:43

In this episode we are joined by Benjamin Bross and Adam Wiekowski, who head the Video Coding Systems Group at the prestigious Fraunhofer HHI research institute. Adam and Benjamin have been central to the development of the latest MPEG video coding standard Versatile Video Coding. They explain VVC's guiding philosophy and what "Versatile" really me…

1
TVV EP 18 - The challenges and opportunities of building a hyper-local OTT service in India 41:44

11M ago41:44

41:44

We are pleased to host Shashank Vaishnav, CTO and co-founder of Stage.in. In this episode we discuss Shashank's unique entrepreneurial journey, and how he and his team have built hyper-localized OTT products in India. We discuss the challenges of product delivery and what he is focused on this year from a technology perspective.…

1
TVV EP 17 - Growing an OTT service via user-sourced subtitles 50:28

1y ago50:28

50:28

In this episode, we are joined by Omkiran (Omki) Sharma, Head of Video Engineering at Rakuten Viki. Omki discusses Viki's origin story and how their user-sourced subtitles led to explosive growth in the early years of their service. He also discusses their video "diff" process to share subtitles between multiple pieces of content that are slightly …

1
TVV EP 16 - Optimizing User-Generated Content for the world 1:06:03

1y ago1:06:03

1:06:03

In this fascinating episode, we are joined by Balu Adsumilli, Head of Media Algorithms at YouTube. In a wide-ranging discussion, he reveals how YouTube balances optimizing video quality with preserving the creative intent of their millions of contributors, and how the media quality task is affected by the changing nature of UGC video with ever-more…

1
TVV EP 15 - Sustainability of M&E in the cloud 33:06

1y ago33:06

33:06

In this episode, we're joined by Thomas Edwards, Principal Architect of Media and Entertainment at AWS. Here Thomas presents the current situation with regards to sustainability, and the goals set by major M&E companies. Thomas then talks about how the cloud can help meet sustainability goals through higher efficiency and scalable, event-driven ope…

1
TVV Ep 14 - Codec for AI, Codec of AI, Codec with AI 1:03:08

1y ago1:03:08

1:03:08

In this episode, Professor Maggie Zhu and her student Zhihao Duan describe the state of the art in AI codecs and their diverse applications. AI compression can be applied to video three ways: augmenting conventional video codecs, completely replacing a conventional codec and also to compress the AI models used for various video applications. They d…

1
TVV Ep 13 - Scaling sports video, and statistical data in the cloud. 41:36

1y ago41:36

41:36

In this episode of the Video Verse, Casey Bateman shares his insights on the challenges of migrating from H264 to HEVC and optimizing live streaming experiences. He also talks about their recent acquisition of BlueFrame Technology and how it will help teams make money by streaming out games to fans. Tune in for an interesting conversation about the…

1
TVV Ep 12 - The evolution of web video elements with Steve Heffernan, creator of Video. JS and co-founder of Mux/Zencoder. 50:21

1+ y ago50:21

50:21

Welcome to our podcast! Today we have Steve Heffernan, Creator of JS and Co-Founder of Mux joining us. We'll be talking about the challenges that come with scaling video technology for websites, and how this technology has become an integral part of web design in recent years. Steve will share his experience on what it takes to make videos more aff…

1
TVV Ep 11 - Without challenges, we don't have anything to do. 38:40

1+ y ago38:40

38:40

In this episode of the Video Verse, CP (CTO of Mola) joins us to discuss how technology is impacting user engagement on platforms. From understanding metaverse and merging lean back and lean forward experiences together; to leveraging content for increased engagement - CP has a lot of wisdom to share with us! Tune in now for an insightful conversat…

1
TVV EP 10 - Tactics to implement ML in video compression and the story behind AWS Elemental's QVBR 39:34

1+ y ago39:34

39:34

Welcome to The Video Verse podcast, the show where we discuss everything related to video. On this episode we'll be talking about AI and machine learning and their effects on video compression with our special guest Ramzi Khsib, a Principal Software Engineer at AWS Elemental. Watch the full video version Learn more about Visionular and get more inf…

1
TVV EP 09 - Hybrid Video Conferencing Directions 35:42

1+ y ago35:42

35:42

Today on the Video Verse, we have Thomas Davies, tech lead for Visionular. He will be discussing the hybrid world of video conferencing: where it started and how its use has developed over time. In addition, he'll let us in on some of the amazing changes this technology has undergone in a mere fifteen years as well as businesses slowly adapting to …

1
TVV EP 08 - Delivering 8K 50 Hz video to today's limited networks and devices. 27:04

1+ y ago27:04

27:04

In today's episode of the video verse, we have Jan De Cock, Director of Coding Development at Synamedia, joining us to discuss the new encoder HEVC and the complexity of delivering 8K 50 Hz video to today's limited networks and devices. While quality has always been a top priority for Synamedia, they continue to make significant steps forward in op…

1
TVV EP 07 - Using AI and ML to scale automated video creation with Wu-Hsi Li of Firework 39:52

1+ y ago39:52

39:52

On average a 30-second video costs around $2,000 to produce. Trying to create thousands of videos at that rate can get quite costly. Wu0Hsi of Firework asked the question, what if we treated a video more like a script, that could be easily edited, modified, and templatized? This approach led them to develop a scalable solution that lets you input y…

1
TVV EP 06 - Behnam Kakavand - Low latency and ultra-low latency streaming 44:29

1+ y ago44:29

44:29

What variables do you need to be aware of when deciding the level of latency you need for your stream? Low and ultra-low latency is a hot topic in sports, live, poker tournaments, or online betting. Video R&D lead engineer at Evolution Gaming Behnam Kakavand, joins us to discuss some things you might want to consider as you make these decisions. Wa…

1
TVV EP 05 - Jean-Baptiste Kempf - The VideoLAN origin story 29:48

1+ y ago29:48

29:48

Most people have heard of VLC, but not everyone knows about VideoLAN, the parent company behind it. Founder Jean-Baptiste Kemp shares humble beginnings by a group of university students as a non-cross-platform and non-opensource solution. Then we discuss other equally exciting projects that VideoLAN is currently working on. Watch the full video ver…

1
TVV EP 04 - Thomas Davies - AV1 for WebRTC 25:54

1+ y ago25:54

25:54

Thomas Davies is a Principal Codec Engineer at Visionular working on all aspects of video codec development and optimization with a special focus on RTC (real-time communications) use cases. Thomas developed the first real-time AV1 HD software video codec, for Cisco Webex, writing video enhancement algorithms, video analysis, real-time pre-filterin…

1
TVV EP 03 - Thomas Daede Pt 2 - AV1 deployment and testing - Is using VMAF still a good idea? 24:06

1+ y ago24:06

24:06

In part 2 of our sitdown with Vimeo's principal codec engineer Thomas Daede, he shares how AV1 is making 10-bit HDR the new standard for all online video. He also shares his views on the best way to evaluate the quality of an encoder, including the ever-debated VMAF scoring method. Is it the best approach, or are there other scoring systems that sh…

1
TVV EP 02 - Thomas Daede Pt 1 - AV1 has its roots in RC planes??? 25:04

1+ y ago25:04

25:04

If you've been around the video codec world at all, then Thomas Daede is a familiar name. From his early days in trying to find a way to stream digital video for FPV RC planes to his cutting-edge work at Vimeo, Thomas is a legend. We dive into how he got started, shedding light on the early days of VP9, HEVC, and the AV1 standard developments in th…

1
Early Modern Feminism 2: Li Zhi 40:33

2y ago40:33

40:33

This episode concludes the two-part series on Early Modern Feminism by skipping across the Eurasian landmass to look at a precise contemporary of Jane Anger, the Elizabethan thinker and writer we looked at last week. Li Zhi was a cantankerous thinker and writer who suffered neither fools nor dogma gladly, and who was not afraid to take on some of t…

1
Early Modern Feminism 1: Jane Anger 46:31

2y ago46:31

46:31

This episode and the next one lean hard into the “eclectic” side of “Eclectic Humanist.” Following up on the series on Roe v. Wade, I'd like to turn the clock back a few hundred years and look at a couple of examples of Early Modern feminism. There is, after all, an ongoing and unabashed effort from the religious right to turn the clock pretty far …

1
TVV EP 01 - Debargha Mukherjee of Google - The history of AV1 + 3 tools you may not know about 35:24

2y ago35:24

35:24

In this special interview with Debargha Mukherjee, Principal Engineer at Google, you will gain critical insights into the development of AV1, including three tools that give AV1 a unique advantage in the market. You’ll want to listen to the end where Debargha shares secrets for how to get the most from a new codec standard so that you can be assure…

1
Roe v. Wade 3: My Daughter’s Enemy 20:19

2y ago20:19

20:19

This episode wraps up, for now, the series I've been doing on the overturning of Roe v. Wade. It discusses the marriage of White Evangelical Christianity with the anti-choice cause in the wake of that 1973 decision, and begins to address the influence of the Christian nationalist ideology known as Dominion Theology on American politics generally an…

1
Roe v. Wade 2: ”Water of Bitterness” 25:25

2y ago25:25

25:25

This episode is the first of three devoted to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. In this installment, I address questions of bodily sovereignty, and look into statistics relevant to abortion ranging from the 1930s to the present. The episode paints a picture of what the pre-Roe US looked like in terms of abortion access and maternal mortality, thus gi…

1
Roe v. Wade 1: View from a Vacant Lot 15:30

2y ago15:30

15:30

This episode is the first of three devoted to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. In this installment, I address questions of bodily sovereignty, and look into statistics relevant to abortion ranging from the 1930s to the present. The episode paints a picture of what the pre-Roe US looked like in terms of abortion access and maternal mortality, thus gi…

1
A Re-Introduction 12:06

2y ago12:06

12:06

This episode re-introduces a project that I had effectively abandoned about a year ago. As such, I'm treating it as a new beginning and laying out my reasons for starting again, most importantly the threat to humanism, and human well-being, currently posed by the religious right. This decision is a direct response to the US Supreme Court's move to …

1
Crossed Trails and What Hobbes Got Wrong 35:56

2y ago35:56

35:56

This episode, continuing last week's theme of COVID-19, human nature, and social responsibility, begins with a random encounter in the woods. It then wanders through some speculation on Hobbesian and Confucian state-of-nature arguments, a brief digression into primatology, and some thoughts on North America's ongoing epidemic of selfishness and soc…

1
What Would Mencius Do: A Confucian Response to COVID 19 30:30

2y ago30:30

30:30

This episode kicks off a new sequence, or maybe a couple of new sequences. I've been wanting to explore both Buddhism and the figure of the cyborg since first starting this little project. As it turns out, by starting with Buddhism, I can do both at the same time as much of my take on both cyborgs and post-humanism generally is rooted in that and o…

1
Diamond Sutra: A Brief Sketch of Mahayana Buddhism 36:15

2y ago36:15

36:15

This episode kicks off a new sequence, or maybe a couple of new sequences. I've been wanting to explore both Buddhism and the figure of the cyborg since first starting this little project. As it turns out, by starting with Buddhism, I can do both at the same time as much of my take on both cyborgs and post-humanism generally is rooted in that and o…

1
Lucretius Book 6: Concluding with a Plague 28:22

2y ago28:22

28:22

This episode concludes our little traipse through Lucretius's On the Nature of Things. In Book 6, Lucretius implicitly addresses the sufficiency of a naturalistic worldview in the making of great art, then brings us face to face with the concrete reality of dying. In describing a historical plague in Athens, he describes in painful detail the doubl…

1
Lucretius Book 5: From Primeval Ooze to Poetry 47:01

2y ago47:01

47:01

In Book 5 of On the Nature of Things, Lucretius presents a naturalistic account of the origins of life and, quite frankly, the origins of species in a well articulated explanation of evolution by natural selection. While he of course lacks the observational mechanisms that we now possess, or that Darwin possessed, he was pretty solid in the broad s…

1
Lucretius Book 4: How We Know Things 39:33

2y ago39:33

39:33

Ever wonder how we know things? Lucretius certainly did, and he also recognized that, without a naturalistic account of knowledge, his proposed Cosmos consisting of nothing other than matter and void would be a non-starter. He argues, necessarily, that all knowledge comes through the senses, and accordingly proposes an empirical epistemology that f…

1
Lucretius Book 3: Death of the Soul and Other Good Things 43:10

2y ago43:10

43:10

In this episode, we continue our exploration of Lucretius's humanist masterpiece, On the Nature of Things. In Book 2, Lucretius begins to explore what it means to live in a Cosmos in which divine interference lays no role and all phenomena are subject to natural laws and naturalistic explanation. Beginning with the smallest objects that can be obse…

1
Lucretius Book 2: Fun with Atoms 37:25

2y ago37:25

37:25

In this episode, we continue our exploration of Lucretius's humanist masterpiece, On the Nature of Things. In Book 2, Lucretius begins to explore what it means to live in a Cosmos in which divine interference lays no role and all phenomena are subject to natural laws and naturalistic explanation. Beginning with the smallest objects that can be obse…

1
Lucretius Book 1: The Material Cosmos 51:12

2y ago51:12

51:12

This episode begins our hands-on discussion of Lucretius's Humanist masterpiece, On the Nature of Things. Book One (of six) presents the best surviving Classical argument for a purely material cosmos consisting of nothing but atoms moving in a void. The argument is the first step in both an overall understanding of how the Cosmos works and, perhaps…

1
Season Introduction and an Introduction to Lucretius 33:08

2y ago33:08

33:08

Greetings, folks, and welcome back. This kick-off to Season Two begins with a brief catch-up as it's been a couple of months since we've been in touch, and then jumps right into the subject matter with which I'd like to begin the year. The topic of the first few little talks will be what, to my mind at least, is the most important work of ancient W…

1
Remembrance Day 1:15:41

2y ago1:15:41

1:15:41

Today is Remembrance Day in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Britain, and Veterans' Day in the US. So, for this episode, as an act of remembrance, I will simply be reading several poems and a chapter from a great and devastating war novel, written by soldiers who served on the Western Front. I am confining the location and time largely for histo…

1
Gratitude, Compassion, and Electoral Politics 25:12

2y ago25:12

25:12

So the US election has been called, and it's all over but the temper tantrum. What do we do now? Where do we go? Well, speaking as an outsider, my first impulse is to rejoice in the triumph of electoral politics over authoritarianism, and I will stand by that impulse (fight me). My second impulse, though, is to ask what those Americans who have liv…

1
Rodger Has Election Jitters 52:43

2y ago52:43

52:43

As the US election closes in, I find myself unable to think about anything else. So, having attempted a couple of other ideas and failed to complete them, I've surrendered to the zeitgeist and recorded an election episode, as much an exorcism of my ambient demons as anything else. The talk ends up revolving around the political philosophy of the an…

1
Attack of the Fundamentalists 4: Stand Against the Dominion 55:19

2y ago55:19

55:19

Here, finally, is the concluding installment in the "Attack of the Fundamentalists" sequence. This one takes a bit of a turn from what I'd originally intended, which had been simply to outline the history of Christian Dominionism inthe US, and instead speaks more broadly about the ongoing cultural conflict between the religious right and reasonable…

1
Thinking Out Loud 32:01

2y ago32:01

32:01

This episode departs from the ongoing series on the rise of Christian Fundamentalism to just plunge, stream-of-consciousness style, into some thoughts that have been occupying my mind lately. It is quite personal, so maybe not for everyone, and simply presents an hour's worth of taking through various thoughts on subjects such as lockdown, mental h…

1
Attack of the Fundamentalists 3: Gimme That Old Time Religion 58:29

2y ago58:29

58:29

Well, folks, I've finally managed to finish the third installment in the Attack of the Fundamentalists series, and I do apologize for the delay. This one roughly spans the time period of the Cold War and touches, in a helter skelter fashion, upon a handful of road markers along Evangelical Christianity's rise to power: McCarthyism, rock and roll, t…

1
Attack of the Fundamentalists 2: Deep Time, Darwin, and Denial 1:09:12

2y ago1:09:12

1:09:12

Damn you, Darwin! This episode picks up the challenge to religious authority posed by modern science, focusing specifically on the emerging knowledge of the age of the Earth in the 19th century and, most importantly, on Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. While a literal reading of the Old Testament suggests an age of about 6,000 yea…

1
Mythic Meanderings 2: Revelation, Ragnarok, and Reality 1:06:28

2y ago1:06:28

1:06:28

In the second part of the Mythic Meanderings sequence, I dig into two end-of-the-world myths: the biblical narrative culminating in Revelation, and the Norse Ragnarok tale. These myths, and the differing understandings of human nature, the divine, and time underlying and articulated in them, have a certain amount of common ground, but oppose each o…

1
Mythic Meanderings 1: Myth, Mind, and Metaphor 53:13

2y ago53:13

53:13

This episode took on a life of its own. Simply put, it is a look at several mythologies in which I explore such elements as time, creation myths, the nature of the gods, and the nature and construction of the other. It ranges freely across several different bodies of thought—Sumerian, Christian, Hindu, Daoist, Greek, Roman, and Celtic—and therefore…

1
Friedrich Nietzsche vs Robert E. Lee 1:00:02

2y ago1:00:02

1:00:02

This episode plunges into contested territory. In many countries, people are calling for the removal of monuments to slavery and genocide while others decry these demands as an assault upon their "culture." It occurs to me that Nietzsche, in his early work _On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life_, has something worthwhile to say on t…

1
A Mohawk Tale 55:40

2y ago55:40

55:40

This episode ended up taking me on an unexpected journey. When I started out, the plan was simply to tell the story of the Six Nations First Nation near Brantford, Ontario applying for membership in the League of Nations in 1923, and the underhanded ways in which the government of Canada, and especially Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs Dunca…

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