Transcoding – Why Is It Vital for Streaming Leave a comment

In the event you’re thinking about streaming media, you probably fall into considered one of camps: Either you already know something about transcoding, otherwise you’re wondering why you keep hearing about it. For those who aren’t positive you want it, bear with me for a couple of paragraphs. I’ll clarify what transcoding is (and isn’t), and why it is perhaps critical to your streaming success — particularly if you wish to deliver adaptive streams to any device.

So, What Is Transcoding?

First, the word transcoding is commonly used as an umbrella term that covers a number of digital media tasks:

Transcoding, at a high level, is taking already-compressed (or encoded) content; decompressing (decoding) it; and then in some way altering and recompressing it. As an example, you may change the audio and/or video format (codec) from one to another, corresponding to converting from an MPEG2 source (commonly utilized in broadforged television) to H.264 video and AAC audio (the most popular codecs for streaming). Other primary tasks could embody adding watermarks, logos, or different graphics to your video.

Transrating refers specifically to altering bitrates, reminiscent of taking a fourK video enter stream at thirteen Mbps and converting it into one or more lower-bitrate streams (additionally known as renditions): HD at 6Mbps, or different renditions at 3 Mbps, 1.8 Mbps, 1 Mbps, 600 kbps, etc.

Transsizing refers specifically to resizing the video frame; say, from a resolution of 3840×2160 (fourK UHD) down to 1920×1080 (1080p) or 1280×720 (720p).

So, when you say “transcoding,” you is perhaps referring to any mixture of the above tasks — and typically are. Video conversion is computationally intensive, so transcoding usually requires more powerful hardware resources, together with faster CPUs or graphics acceleration capabilities.

What Transcoding Is Not

Transcoding shouldn’t be confused with transmuxing, which will also be referred to as repackaging, packetizing or rewrapping. Transmuxing is once you take compressed audio and video and — without altering the precise audio or video content material — (re)package it into totally different delivery formats.

For instance, you might have H.264/AAC content material, and by altering the container it’s packaged in, you’ll be able to deliver it as HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), Smooth Streaming, HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) or Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH). The computational overhead for transmuxing is far smaller than for transcoding.

When Is Transcoding Critical?

Merely put: Transcoding is critical while you need your content to reach more end users.

For instance, let’s say you want to do a live broadforged using a camera and encoder. You could be compressing your content with a RTMP encoder, and select the H.264 video codec at 1080p.

This must be delivered to on-line viewers. But for those who try to stream it directly, you will have just a few problems. First, viewers without sufficient bandwidth aren’t going to be able to view the stream. Their players will be buffering always as they wait for packets of that 1080p video to arrive. Secondly, the RTMP protocol is now not widely supported for playback. Apple’s HLS is way more widely used. Without transcoding and transmuxing the video, you will exclude virtually anybody with slower data speeds, tablets, mobile phones, and linked TV devices.

Utilizing a transcoding software or service, you can concurrently create a set of time-aligned video streams, every with a different bitrate and frame measurement, while converting the codecs and protocols to reach additional viewers. This set of internet-pleasant streams can then be packaged into a number of adaptive streaming formats (e.g., HLS), permitting playback on almost any screen on the planet.

One other common instance is broadcasting live streams using an IP camera, as can be the case with surveillance cameras and site visitors cams. Once more, to reach the most important number of viewers with the absolute best quality allowed by their bandwidth and units, you’d want to help adaptive streaming. You’d deliver one HD H.264/AAC stream to your transcoder (typically located on a server image within the cloud), which in turn would create a number of H.264/AAC renditions at different bitrates and resolutions. Then you’d have your media server (which could be the same server as your transcoder) package those renditions into one or more adaptive streaming formats before delivering them to finish users.

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