Based on more than 30 patents developed in conjunction with British Telecom, MediaMelon QBR is not a new codec, but rather is an enhancement of existing adaptive bitrate (ABR) technology. It uses rapid scene analysis, content characterization, perceptual quality mapping, and advanced buffer management techniques to pre-analyze where video quality is likely to suffer. With this data, QBR allocates higher bitrates to video scenes where a lower bitrate would have caused artifacts. This increases perceptual video quality by more than 200%, MediaMelon says.