The Basics Of Video Transcoding For The Web

By Author: Ivan Cuxeva Jr
Total Articles: 782
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In order to encode video for the web you will need to decide whether you want to upload your content to video sharing sites or if you want to upload it to your own website, there is a big difference between the two as you will soon find out. Video sharing for the web involves a lot of work unless you only want to upload them to sites such as Youtube, and others which made this one, let's start by explaining how to transcode video for social sharing sites.

Let's assume that you have already captured a video which you want to upload to Youtube, you will first need to transcode it into a compatible format that the site will be able to handle and convert them to FLV, such formats are MPEG, AVI, MOV and WMV, in order to achieve the best quality is recommended for you to upload the videos using a resolution of 640x480 however you may also upload them even if they use a resolution of the 320 x 240 which is the actual resolution you see on the site, the video bitrate to be used should vary from 700 kbps all the way to 1500 kbps, obviously the lower the bit rate that is quality or video will have but is not recommended to exceed ...
... 1500 kbps because you will not be able to see much of a difference anyways.

If you decide to increase the video bitrate you will have to spend a lot more time of loading the video to the web because the file size has been increased with this adjustment.

If you decide to upload your video to your own blog or website you will be able to publish your content without any restraints however, there are some factors that you should take into consideration when uploading video to the web. The first thing you should consider this your hosting bandwidth, if you are using a virtual host you are very likely to be regulated by fair use policies, in other words if your site starts to consume too many resources of the host you might be asked to regulate your traffic order to decrease the load your site represents to the server, if you are not able to regulated it may be taken down, this scenario will only happen if you had a high traffic website, in other words if you have thousands upon thousands of visitors you might want to consider another solution.

If you transcode video for the web using optimized codecs you will be able to stream at this content at a higher-resolution compared to other video sharing sites such as Youtube, the format of choice for webpages vary from WMV to FLV, WMV provides a higher compression ratio if you compared to a container such as MPEG and the resolution will be much better as well, the only downside is that your visitors will be able to download your content, if you are selling memberships this might not be a very good solution which is why business people decide to use formats such as FLV which are not as easy to copy or download without using special tools, for the most part web visitors will use the right-click feature in their browsers in order to save the video you have uploaded, using flash technology or FLV they will be unable to save your streaming videos to their hard drive used in the right-click feature.

Transcoding video for the web is all about compatible formats, bandwidth and quality, these are all of the most important factors that you want to take into consideration if you want to stream your media.