Actually, no. What Diaz showed is that Beamr is offering nothing that actually improves either visual quality or bitrate; every setting that their method uses actually reduces quality compared to default x264 settings.
> What Diaz showed is that Beamr is offering nothing that actually improves either visual quality or bitrate
Well too bad Beamr never made that claim (AFAIK). What Beamr does claim is that their software can automatically find settings (per frame) that will compress a certain video file to it's smallest size without affecting quality (too much - in some subjective measure).
I'm not saying that Beamr is great. I have no idea, I've never used it. But what I can say for sure is that Daiz has not made a fair evaluation of the technology in the OP.
> I think Diaz just pointed out that these claims are dubious at best
He did no such thing. He just pointed out that you can get the same benefits from using x264 directly.
Most people just take the h264 stream they got from their phone / camera / BluRay rip. These are horribly compressed. x264 can consistently improve those without degrading quality by 30% without much tweaking, and by 50-70% with some tweaking.
Apparently, Beamr saves you some tweaking. Diaz' claim is that the tweaking saved is ridiculously minimal and does not warrant all the hyperbole around beamr.
