The Basics Of Video Transcoding For Portable Devices

By Author: Ivan Cuxeva Jr
Total Articles: 782
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Transcoding high-resolution videos in order to be played back on portable devices is not as hard as it might sound, you will definitely need special software which will allow you to transcode the video into a playable format that your portable device can handle. You can take several video sources in order to get your material for instance, you may download video straight from a social video sharing site such as Youtube, you may take video straight from your video camera or digital camera or you may even rip particular scenes from a DVD you already own.

When you take a high-quality source the most obvious step to compress the video stream as much as possible in order to make it manageable, that is in terms of video bit rate and file size. If you have dealt with portable devices which are capable of playing back video then you know that they are incapable of showing high-resolution or high-definition material in other words, throwing a 1280 x 720 video scene into your portable device will not provide much benefit because the device itself can't show more than a 320 x 240 resolution, some portable devices which have been ...
... designed specifically to play back video may go higher than that but most portable players will stay at very low resolutions.

Now that we know a little bit about how portable devices handle resolution it is safe to assume that most video files which are encoded with the purpose of being stored in portable players can be encoded using a relatively low bit rate and low resolution without losing much quality at the time of playback. If we were to use the very same compress video source for a high-definition TV we would definitely notice very heavy pixelation because a resolution was not set for HD players.

If you take video from Youtube you will obviously need a tool which will allow you to convert from FLV to either MPEG-4 or AVI which are popular preview containers which can be played back by portable players, when you take such videos from one format to another you may want to set the bit rate at around 500 to 700 kbps, you may not want to go higher than that because as we have previously stated he will not see much of a difference in the video quality because the player is incapable of showing a high-resolution, if you opt to increase the video bit rate or resolution you will only increase the file size which may be a problem if your portable player has limited memory.