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7 posts on video.

Video on the web that plays everywhere

A video that plays on every machine you own and shows only a poster on somebody else's older iPad has at least five unrelated causes, and the browser will not tell you which one you have. Here is the ladder I walk, cheapest rung first, and the two-line ffmpeg recipe that settles most of the argument before it starts.

The fine print on AI video in 2026: what the terms say

I spent a day reading six AI video licences on the vendors' own pages instead of trusting the model cards. One of them forbids commercial use of the output without written permission. One of them excludes the United States from its territory. And the watermark you can switch off is not the one that matters.

MiniMax H3: the Hailuo image-to-video model, in practice

H3 sits third on the image-to-video arena, generates its own stereo audio in the same pass, and turns a client photograph into five seconds of video for forty cents. It also ships open weights under a licence that excludes the United States by name. Both of those are true, and a studio has to hold both.

Which AI video model should a small studio use in 2026

OpenAI removes Sora from its API on 24 September. I re-priced the whole field off vendor rate cards rather than blog posts: what five seconds of video costs on each model, where the arena actually ranks them, and the licence clauses that decide it before the quality does.

World Labs Atlas: what a world model means for AI and physics

World Labs announced Atlas on 1 September 2026, a model trained on 3D Gaussian splats alongside text, images and video. Who built it, what a splat actually is, what the physics benchmarks say, and what a small studio can do with the parts that already ship.

The scroll-scrub stack: what actually makes it smooth

A scrubbed film either reads as liquid or as a slideshow being dragged, and I finally measured where the difference lives. It is the encode. One clip, three encodes, sixty seeks each: a median of 3 ms against 15 ms against 32 ms, with the whole frame budget sitting at 16.7. Here is the loop, the encode, the dead zones, and the one line that makes iPhones cooperate.

Scroll-scrubbed video, the cheapest premium feel on the web

I taught the studio toolchain the Apple-style scroll-scrub technique, then built eight live demos from five-second phone clips to prove it. What makes a scrubbed page feel premium, the plumbing nobody mentions, and where the technique actually earns its keep.

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