Transcoding has been an important function in the video world for several years now. As the compatibility of video rendering expanded in scope across devices and platforms transcoding became even more critical. Traditionally, transcoding ensured the conversion of video content into different formats to get them ready for consumption in the desired output mediums. While this has been a great feature to leverage, the pains of having to deal with several videos manually was very high. This has significantly changed with the introduction of cloud. Cloud video transcoding has changed the landscape drastically bringing in more ease and automation to the whole process.
Steps associated with installing the transcoding software, manually transcoding files in the queue have all been done away with now. Managing voluminous video content (both before and specifically after transcoding) on the queue has also become more feasible with the storage available on the cloud.
Transcoding function is increasingly becoming sophisticated in more than one way in the recent times – this includes complete control and transparency as the transcoding happens, closed captioning migrations, reduction in time delays both during transcoding and the queuing/waiting time, the number of supported formats etc.
However, the transcoding workflow is not a rosy scene completely, as yet. Adaptive bitrate and live streaming, bring in their own challenges in providing a seamless transcoding experience. Similarly, the impact on video quality during the process is often not un-noticeable. While not all of these challenges are fully addressed today, the cloud video transcoding promises and mitigates them to a large extent.
The industry will continue to evolve in this space in the coming years to make the video transcoding process simpler, faster, cheaper and more reliable. And to be able to do all of these, the cloud will play a very important role in the entire workflow of video transcoding.