Online video streaming is a task that delivers video content with the use of various technologies. These technologies help in making the video manageable and video content deliverable. The video industry has transformed itself over the years. The previous era was the time of VHS tapes and DVDs and now digital files are playable quickly over the internet. In this paced world, video delivery has been made faster with the use of video encoding. What is video encoding, why is it important and how does it work? These are primary questions that one can ask after knowing the term. To make it a simple thing, we are here to explain it in the simplest possible manner. Let us dig a little deeper to understand what it is, why it is important, and how it works.
What Is Video Encoding?
Have you ever transferred any video files to another device? It is indeed a task. This is because video files are heavy in size. It is primarily since these files contain immense data in seconds. Did you ever think about how live video streaming platform manage to transfer data over the internet? Video encoding comes into the role here. It is a process of compressing the RAW video files into a more manageable form or in short if helps in reducing their size. This technology helps in making on-demand and real-time or live streaming possible over the internet.
Why Is Video Encoding Important For Video Streaming?
Videos are collections of still images. These still images when played continuously made an illustration of movement. Think of it with an example. Let’s say you are recording a video in 25 frames per second (fps). It means you are going to show 24 still images in one second which turns into 1500 still images in one minute. This makes a huge collection according to the time and at last, generates heavy files. To transfer these heavy files, video encoding becomes important. This helps in compressing the file by removing all the redundant images and making it short in size.
How Does It Work?
During the process of video encoding, the visual file undergoes compression. In this process, the nonrequired data is removed or thrown to get a quality video that is too small size. It is somewhere similar and somewhere different from the zip files that people use. Zip files are also compressed files yet are different from video compression. This difference is visible at the time of decompression. Decompression of a zip file can restore the file in its 100% original format. But in video compression, all the nonrequired data are literally removed and cannot be restored in their original format.
The encoding process totally relies on video encoding software. These are called video codecs in case of video encoding and audio codecs in case of audio encoding. These codecs use encoding algorithms to compress video and audio files. After all this encoding process, decoding happens. Video decoders are used to decompress the encoded file to stream the content to the viewers.
All in all, it is the technology that has brought your shows to your device seamlessly. Without video encoding, it had been a mammoth task to deliver or transfer video content from one place to another. Indeed it is a revolution in the video industry.