Stop Guessing at Video Quality With Native VMAF Scoring
If you’ve ever squinted at a transcode and wondered “is that good enough?”… you’re not alone. Subjective eyeball tests have been the default quality check in video workflows for way too long. We’re bringing something better to StreamShark’s VOD platform. Native VMAF scoring for every transcode, across every codec we support.
What Is VMAF, and Why Should You Care?
VMAF (Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion) is a perceptual video quality metric developed by Netflix. It predicts how a human viewer would rate the quality of a video on a scale from 0 to 100. Rather than measuring raw pixel-level differences, VMAF is trained on real human perception data. A score of 93 actually means something close to “visually indistinguishable from the source” for most viewers.
The short version is that it’s the closest thing we have to an objective answer to “does this look good?”
How It Will Work in StreamShark
When you upload content to StreamShark’s VOD platform, each rendition will be scored automatically during the transcode process. There’s nothing to configure and no extra step in your workflow. The platform will run a VMAF evaluation against your source file for every output profile, and the scores will show up right in the management portal.
That means if you’re encoding to H.264, HEVC, AV1, or any other codec we support, you’ll get a quality score sitting next to each rendition. You’ll be able to compare across codecs, across bitrate ladders, across encoding presets. All from one place.
What This Actually Lets You Do
Validate your encoding ladder. You might assume your 1080p rendition at 4.5 Mbps is fine. VMAF will tell you whether that’s actually true or whether you’re burning bandwidth on quality nobody can see.
Compare codecs with real numbers. Switching from H.264 to HEVC? Evaluating AV1? Instead of running test encodes and gathering opinions, you can pull up the VMAF scores side by side and make the call based on data.
Catch quality issues before they reach viewers. A VMAF score that drops below your threshold is an early warning. Maybe the source had problems. Maybe a particular scene is giving the encoder trouble. Either way, you know before your audience does.
Prove quality to stakeholders. “The transcode looks fine” is a hard sell in a meeting. “Every rendition scores above 90 on VMAF” is a different conversation entirely.
Confidence Before You Go Live
StreamShark’s VOD platform integrates with Live Schedule, which means VOD content often ends up as part of a live premiere or a tentpole broadcast event. When that’s the case, quality isn’t just nice to have. It’s the whole point. VMAF scoring gives you hard confirmation that your transcodes meet the bar before they go to air. No surprises, no scrambling during a live event because something looked off in the player.
Built for VR and AR Too
Quality takes on a different weight when the screen is strapped to someone’s face. In VR and AR experiences, compression artifacts that might slide on a laptop become glaring and immersion-breaking in a headset. Every flaw is magnified, and viewers notice immediately. Having a VMAF score for each rendition means you can set a higher quality floor for immersive content and verify that every encode actually clears it.
No Extra Tools, No Separate Pipeline
The key thing here is that this won’t be bolted on. You won’t need to download encodes, spin up a VMAF evaluation tool, and cross-reference the results yourself. The scoring will run as part of the transcode pipeline, and the results will live in the same portal where you manage everything else.
For teams managing large content libraries, that difference between “possible with extra effort” and “already done for you” is the difference between actually using quality metrics and just talking about them.
The Bottom Line
Video quality shouldn’t be a matter of opinion. VMAF gives you a number you can trust, and StreamShark will put that number in front of you automatically for every piece of content you process. Every codec, every rendition, every time.
Native VMAF scoring is coming soon for our Enterprise and Broadcast customers. If you’re heading to NAB Show 2026, come find us and we’ll walk you through a live demo. Otherwise, get in touch and we’ll make sure you’re first to know when it launches.
