At IBC 2023, software codec provider VisualOn arrived on the show floor with a dubious claim for its new Optimizer product, branded as the world’s first universal content-adaptive encoding (CAE) product. After some pre-show digging, VisualOn confirmed to Faultline that “universal” was the key word here, as Optimizer can be deployed with any third-party encoder, flying in the face of any vendor lock-ins in the transcoding world. Following up with Faultline in Amsterdam, VisualOn’s President and CEO, Yang Cai, told us the Optimizer works by taking uncompressed video feeds and reviewing the constant rate factor (CRF) – the default quality setting for H.264 files. “CAE has traditionally been vertically integrated. The fact that the Optimizer is independent means that the…