How Is Video Transcoding Improving the Streaming Experience?

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Streaming video is the new normal, with close to 80% of all internet content being in video format. However, buffering issues are a common problem, causing companies to fail in providing a quality video streaming experience for their users. Using video transcoding presents a solution to address these challenges. In this article, I will cover what is video transcoding and why it is important to achieve a quality video experience.

What Is Video Transcoding?

Video transcoding is the conversion of a video from one encoding format to another. This means translating the file format, the video, and the audio, creating multiple versions of the same video. You can optimize different versions for different users, adapting the quality of the videos for the internet speed of the users, avoiding buffering. This function is crucial to address target devices that don’t support your media format or require a smaller file size.

Video files usually contain a lot of data such as visual and audio, requiring large memory and bandwidth. Therefore, compressing video files helps to avoid buffering issues. Different devices require different formats and file sizes━for example, a person watching a video on a smart TV with a LAN connection instead of using a smartphone connected to public wifi.

Why Is Video Transcoding Important?

Nowadays, people often use video streaming services across multiple devices (computers, smartphones, tablets). Video encoding technology allows you to adapt the streaming with different resolutions, qualities and bit rates according to the target device.

One use case for this technology is when the target device does not support the video format, so you need to convert the video to a supported format. Another use case is when the device capacity is smaller than the original file, thus requiring the file to be reduced to fit to the new format.

Yet another of the most common applications of transcoding is when you attempt to upload files to websites such as Vimeo or YouTube, which require you to transcode the video into a format supported by the website.

This technology allows you to create, for example, different time-aligned video streams, allowing you to reduce the size without degrading the quality. You can also optimize the video bitrate conserving bandwidth and storage space.

The transcoding process usually involves two steps. The first is decoding, meaning to uncompress the original data. The second step involves re-encoding, where the file is transferred to the new device in the desired format.

Originally, this technology was limited to convert video files from one device to another. In recent years, cloud video transcoding has helped to popularize video streaming. There are many cloud video transcoding apps and platforms, some of them can transform a single file into over a hundred different versions.

Cloud Vs On-Premise Transcoding

What would work better, cloud or on-premise video transcoding? Each approach has pros and cons. Let’s have a quick comparison:

Local Transcoding

• Slower—resulting in multiple files that should be uploaded and managed separately.
• Requires compression software—such as Adobe Premier or Final Cut X to transcode a video.
• No subscription cost—unlike cloud services that require pay the sign up with the cloud video encoding services provider.

Cloud Transcoding

• Fast and easy to use—you only need to upload the master file to the platform, select the options for that file and the platform transcodes the file to those versions.
• No need for special software—you don’t require special video editing software as all transcoding is managed by the platform.

Popular Codecs And Formats

To start with video transcoding we need to talk about formats and codecs.

Video Codec
Is any device or software that compresses a video file. They work removing extra data from the video file reducing its size keeping as much quality as possible. Codecs use algorithms to compress the frames, and there are two types of frame compressions: Inter-frame and intra-frame.

The intra-frame compression involves compressing each frame independently of the others.
Inter-frame compression identifies extraneous data such as redundancies across frames to compress the files. For example, a static background.

Some video codec types include:

• Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG)—the most popular category of video codecs. The compression standard that is most used currently is the H.264 that was added to Apple’s QuickTime and Flash.
• VP9—available under a BSD License by Google with source code as libvpx VP9 codec SDK.
• Theora—a lossy video compression format, it is distributed free without licensing and is derived from VP3 codec.

Video Format
Informs playback devices how video and audio are combined and how to play the files. Examples of video format are MP4, .Mov, and .Flv. The format needs to be compatible with the platform you wish to use, therefore sometimes transcoding is necessary to convert the video file to a supported format.

A file format is like a container with data compressed by a video codec. As such, one file format may support multiple video codecs. The most popular file formats include:

• QuickTime File Format—a multimedia format used by Apple’s framework.
• MP4—the most popular video format. It is used to store both digital video and audio.
• FLV—this file format is used for video content to play using Adobe Flash Player.
• WebM—a Google license free video container format, using primarily the VP8 and VP9 codecs.
• Ogg—a video format is supported by the Wikipedia community.
• Advanced Systems Format—Microsoft’s video container format, designed specially for video streaming.

The Bottom Line

Transcoding is about making your video as much accessible as possible. With the rise in video content online, video transcoding is an essential technology to provide a good quality streaming experience. The popularity of cloud video transcoding is helping organizations to stream videos more effectively, adapting to the video format and the device the consumer is using.

With this technology, you can deliver content that can be played across devices without compromising quality. Therefore, to succeed in a market that demands more quality video content than ever, you cannot risk buffering or wrong file format issues to stall your content reaching the user.

Using a cloud video transcoding solution will take the hassle out of converting the video and then uploading it. Most platforms even take care of automating transcoding for streaming. Video transcoding can thus be the solution to optimize your video file to fit seamlessly with the needs of the user.