Nikolay Sapunov

Nikolay Sapunov

CEO at Fora Soft

Nikolay Sapunov is the CEO of Fora Soft, a software studio specialising in video-centric products — streaming platforms, WebRTC apps, video conferencing, and AI-driven video tools. He writes the Video Encoding knowledge base to give product and engineering teams a clear, no-jargon way to reason about codecs, compression, HDR, and the trade-offs behind every video architecture decision.

Articles by this author

Benchmarking and Comparing Encoders: Same VMAF, Different Bitrate / Speed

Comparing two video encoders by file size alone is the most common mistake in our industry, because a smaller file at lower quality is not a win, and a…

22
min

Content-Aware and Context-Aware Encoding

Content-aware encoding looks at what is inside the video — how busy the picture is, how much motion is in each shot, where the viewer will actually look…

18
min

AI Inside the Encoder: ML-Based Mode Decision, Partitioning, Scene-Cut, Perceptual Quantization

When people say "AI inside the encoder" in 2026, they almost never mean a neural codec that replaces H.264 or AV1 — they mean a small, fast model bolted…

22
min

Objective Quality Metrics: PSNR, SSIM, MS-SSIM, VMAF

An objective video quality metric is a number — produced by an algorithm, not by a human — that tries to predict how good a viewer would say a piece of…

26
min

Transcoding Pipeline in Depth: Decode → Filter → Encode → Mux

A transcoding pipeline is the four-stage assembly line that takes a video file in one format and produces a different file in another: demux, decode, fi…

5
min

Encoder Implementations: x264, x265, libvpx, SVT-AV1, rav1e, libaom, vvenc

A codec standard such as H.264 or AV1 is only a recipe; the encoder is the kitchen that actually cooks the file. The same recipe cooked by x264, SVT-AV1…

5
min

DRM and Packaging for Protected Delivery: Widevine, FairPlay, PlayReady, CENC

Digital rights management (DRM) is the lock on your premium video; common encryption (CENC) is the lock standard that lets one encrypted file open with…

30
min

Cloud Transcoding: AWS Elemental, Bitmovin, Coconut, NETINT

Cloud transcoding is the practice of renting someone else's video pipeline — servers, encoders, hardware accelerators, and packagers — instead of runnin…

29
min

Per-Title and Per-Scene Encoding: Smart Bitrate Ladders

A bitrate ladder is the set of resolution-and-bitrate pairs your service offers to viewers, and the old way to build one was to copy a fixed list from A…

14
min

FFmpeg: A Must-Know Cheat Sheet for Developers

FFmpeg is the command-line tool that almost every video-handling product in the world quietly runs on — Netflix, YouTube, OBS, VLC, Plex, Zoom, every cl…

24
min

Containers: MP4, fMP4, MKV, WebM, MOV, MPEG-TS

A video container is the file that wraps a compressed video stream, one or more audio streams, subtitles, chapter markers, and the metadata a player nee…

22
min

Reordering, Zig-Zag Scan, and Run-Length Coding

Quantization leaves a video codec with a small grid of mostly-zero numbers, and the next job is to flatten that grid into a one-dimensional list whose z…

5
min

Quantization: Where Quality Is Lost

Quantization is the one stage of a video codec where information is permanently thrown away — every blurry edge, every block of muddy sky, every flat re…

5
min

Transform Coding: DCT, ADST, and Integer Transforms

A video encoder spends almost no bits on raw pixels — it spends them on the leftover errors after prediction, and those errors are reshuffled by a mathe…

5
min

Slices, Tiles and Parallel Processing

Modern video codecs split every frame into independent regions so several CPU cores or hardware engines can work on the same frame at the same time. H.2…

5
min

GOP Structure: I, P, B-Frames, Open vs Closed GOP

A Group of Pictures (GOP) is the slice of a video stream that begins with a keyframe and ends just before the next one — the smallest chunk of video tha…

5
min

Inter-Frame Coding and Motion Estimation

Inter-frame coding compresses a video frame by describing how it has moved and changed compared to other frames the decoder has already seen. The encode…

26
min

Intra-Frame Coding: How a Single Frame Is Compressed

Intra-frame coding is the part of a video codec that compresses one picture using only the pixels inside that picture — no reference to past or future f…

5
min

Bit Allocation Inside a GOP

A group of pictures (GOP) is the unit a modern encoder budgets together — one I-frame and the chain of P- and B-frames that depend on it. Bit allocation…

5
min

Rate Control: CBR, VBR, CRF, ABR, Capped CRF

Rate control is the outer loop that decides how many bits each frame, each scene, and each whole title is allowed to use. Five families ship in every mo…

5
min

Mode Decision and Rate-Distortion Optimization (RDO)

Mode decision is the choice an encoder makes thousands of times per frame: at every block in the picture, which one of dozens of available coding tools…

5
min

In-Loop Filtering: Deblocking, SAO, ALF, and CDEF

In-loop filtering is the stage of a video codec that smooths over the artefacts left behind by block-based compression — the visible grid of squares aro…

5
min

Entropy Coding in Detail: CAVLC, CABAC, and Arithmetic Coding

Entropy coding is the last step in a video encoder — the step that turns a stream of small integers, run-level pairs, and decision flags into the actual…

5
min

Hybrid Video Codec Architecture

Every mainstream video codec from MPEG-2 in 1994 to AV1 in 2018 and AV2 in 2025 uses the same internal blueprint, called the block-based hybrid architec…

5
min

LCEVC (MPEG-5 Part 2): An Enhancement Layer on Top of Any Codec

LCEVC is a thin software layer that sits on top of an existing video codec like H.264, HEVC, VP9, AV1 or VVC and makes the picture sharper at a lower bi…

17
min

AV1: The New Internet Standard And Where It Stands In 2026

AV1 is the royalty-free video codec published by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) in March 2018 — a single piece of software, jointly built by Goog…

31
min

VP8 And VP9: Google's Open Alternative

VP8 and VP9 are the two video codecs — software that packs raw pictures into small files and unpacks them back — that Google released royalty-free after…

5
min

H.265 / HEVC: +50% Over H.264 And The Patent Nightmare

H.265, the standard the industry calls High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), is the video codec — the software that packs raw video into a small file and…

5
min

H.264 / AVC: The Workhorse of the Internet

H.264, also known as Advanced Video Coding (AVC), is the video codec — short for coder-decoder, the software that packs raw video into a small file and…

5
min

MPEG-2: The Grandfather of Digital TV

MPEG-2 is the video codec — short for coder-decoder, the software that squeezes raw video into a small file and unpacks it back into a picture — that tu…

14
min

Key Scientific Breakthroughs Behind Video Codecs: Information Theory, Prediction, and Transform

Every modern video codec — H.264, HEVC, AV1, VVC, the AV2 that AOMedia is finalising in 2026 — rides on three scientific breakthroughs that landed betwe…

21
min

How to Choose a Codec for Your Service in 2026: A Decision Tree

Choosing a video codec in 2026 is no longer a one-codec decision — every serious video service ships at least two and usually three codecs in parallel,…

22
min

Comparison Table: MPEG-2, H.264, H.265, VP9, AV1, VVC

A video codec — short for coder-decoder — is the piece of software, or the chip inside a phone, that squeezes raw video into a small file and unpacks it…

21
min

AV2: What to Expect in the Next 5–10 Years

AV2 is the next open, royalty-free video codec from the Alliance for Open Media, designed to deliver roughly 30% lower bitrate than AV1 at matching qual…

15
min

A Short History of Video Codecs: From H.120 (1984) to AV2 (2025)

A video codec — short for coder-decoder — is the piece of software that turns raw video into a small file you can send across the internet, and turns th…

22
min

How Far Can We Compress: The Shannon Limit And Where We Are Today

There is a mathematical floor below which no codec can compress a given source without losing more quality than the math allows, and that floor was name…

14
min

8-Bit Vs 10-Bit Encoding: The "10-Bit Is Just For HDR" Myth

"10-bit is only for HDR" is one of the most expensive myths in production video, and it costs teams real bandwidth every quarter they believe it. A 10-b…

14
min

Psycho-Visual Redundancy: Things The Viewer Won't Notice

Human eyes are good at some things and terrible at others, and a modern video codec spends most of its budget hiding distortion exactly where the eye is…

15
min

Temporal Pixel Correlation: Redundancy Between Frames

Most pixels in a video do not change from one frame to the next, and a modern video codec earns the lion's share of its compression by noticing that fac…

17
min

Spatial Pixel Redundancy: What's Inside a Single Frame

A single video frame is enormously repetitive — most pixels look almost the same as the pixels right next to them — and a video codec earns most of its…

16
min

The Compression Landscape: Lossless vs Lossy, Image vs Video, Production vs Delivery

Compression turns a giant pile of pixel data into a smaller file, and the industry splits the job along two axes: whether the file is lossless (every or…

15
min

Why We Compress Video: The Math of Bitrate

Bitrate is the number of bits a video pushes through a network or stores on disk every second, and it is the single number that decides whether your str…

18
min

Transfer Functions: Gamma, PQ, and HLG

A transfer function is the small mathematical recipe a video file uses to translate a number into a brightness on screen, and back. The old recipe — cal…

17
min

Bit Depth: 8, 10, 12 Bits and the Banding Problem

Bit depth is the number of digits a video uses to record one shade of one colour at one pixel. The everyday number is 8 bits, which gives 256 different…

14
min

Colour Spaces: RGB, YCbCr, BT.709, BT.2020, DCI-P3

When you store a colour as numbers in a video file, you have to agree with the person reading those numbers about exactly which colour each number means…

19
min

The Complete Guide to HDR: HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, and HLG

By Nikolay Sapunov, CEO at Fora Soft · May 2026 · 22 min read

22
min

Sampling and the Nyquist Theorem Applied to Video

Every digital video is a continuous real-world scene that has been "sampled" — measured at a regular grid of fixed points in space and time. The Nyquist…

10
min

The Future: AV2, Neural Codecs, and End-to-End Learned Compression

Three forces are reshaping the video codec landscape between now and 2030: a new hand-engineered codec called AV2 from the Alliance for Open Media that…

26
min

Progressive vs Interlaced Scan: What You Actually Need to Know

There are two ways to "draw" each frame of a video — the modern way and the legacy way. The modern way, called progressive scan, draws the whole frame i…

6
min

What is Digital Video: From Analog Signal to Bits

Digital video is just a long list of still pictures, shown fast enough that your eye sees motion instead of slides. Each picture is a grid of tiny colou…

11
min

Block-Based Prediction: MBs, CTUs, SBs and Superblocks

Every modern video codec compresses a frame by chopping it into rectangles, predicting each rectangle from neighbours or earlier frames, and storing onl…

5
min

Frame Rate: 24, 60, 120 fps, Judder, and Motion Blur

By Nikolay Sapunov, CEO at Fora Soft · May 2026 · 13 min read

13
min

Entropy Coding: A Short Introduction (Huffman, Arithmetic, CABAC)

After a codec has predicted, transformed, and quantised a frame, what is left is a stream of numbers — most of them small, most of them zero, but writte…

16
min

Glossary: 50 Terms Every Video Engineer Should Know

By Nikolay Sapunov, CEO at Fora Soft · May 2026 · reference

11
min

H.266 / VVC: Technically Excellent, Market-Weak

H.266, marketed as Versatile Video Coding (VVC), is the successor codec to H.265/HEVC published jointly by ITU-T and ISO/IEC in July 2020 as a result of…

26
min

Hardware Acceleration: GPU, VPU, ASIC (NVENC, QuickSync, VideoToolbox, AMF, NETINT)

Hardware acceleration is the practice of moving video encoding and decoding out of the general-purpose CPU and onto a chip designed specifically for the…

13
min

Subjective Testing: MOS, ITU-R BT.500, DSCQS, ACR

A subjective video quality test is a controlled study where real people watch video clips and score how good they look, and the average of those scores…

17
min

Specialist software house for video, real-time and AI products. Founded 2005. 50 in-house engineers.

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