Lossless-to-lossless: By taking advantage of better compression and hardware support a file can be losslessly compressed.

The only reason to use this form of transcoding is to lower the bitrate and save storage space on portable players. It means you already have a file with decreased quality and transcoding causes the quality to degrade even further.

Lossy-to-lossy: This is the least ideal form of transcoding.

With that in mind, there are three types of transcoding: Encoding can use lossless compression, but it results in decreased compression rates and increased media file sizes. This process is particularly useful when users use multiple target devices, such as different mobile phones and web browsers, that do not all support the same native formats or have limited storage capacity.Įncoding is a naturally lossy process, meaning that it causes a certain amount of data to be discarded and ultimately decreases audio and video quality. Transcoding, on the other hand, allows for already encoded data to be converted to another encoding format.

OverviewĮncoding and transcoding are sometimes used interchangeably, but the two processes, although closely related, are indeed different.Įncoding is the process of compressing video and audio files to be compatible with a single target device. Transcoding is the process of converting an audio or video file from one encoding format to another in order to increase the number of compatible target devices a media file can be played on.

Video transcoder open source