Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Advances in technology are reshaping the way we access content every passing day. With the success of YouTube and Netflix, most of the content being accessed nowadays is video content.

As the video content revolutionizes the tech industry, every other company is getting on the band wagon and opting to use video content for entertainment, education, marketing, communication, etc. A lot of work is being done and new algorithms are being generated every day to optimize the video content, to store, deliver, and analyze more efficiently and to provide a better experience to the end user.

As video content is catching heat, the amount of devices being used to access it is also being doubled with a lot of variation and so is the bandwidth being used to deliver and access it. Thus, this causes the problem of compatibility and optimization. The videos have to be compatible with all kinds of devices and optimized to provide hassle free access to the content to the end user. To achieve that compatibility and optimization, video encoding is done.

Video encoding is the process of converting a video’s format to another format to make it more compatible with the containers hosting the content. This is on the grounds that video can exist in multiple formats with various factors, for example, formats like .mp4, .flv, .avi and .wmv, and can have different kinds of codecs (which are responsible for the compression/decompression) and, henceforth, different qualities implied for different applications. The process takes place as multiple encoding profiles are configured and sent to the encoder. The encoder then receives the encoding profiles and prepares the video for the specific encoding profile output.

Source: Giphy

To explain it a bit briefly, to encode video content, there are a few parameters that matter which are stored in the encoding profiles. The format, the codecs used for compression/decompression and the bit-rate. The formats (MP4, AVI, MOV) are containers developed by different companies which contain everything that a video needs to play, such as video data, audio tracks, subtitles, etc. The codecs also exist inside the containers. The codecs are specifically responsible for video size, speed and quality.

The better the codec used for the video, the better the quality of the video. The codecs also help in reducing the size of the video so it takes less storage space. The most common types of codecs are DivX, x264, and FFMpeg, etc. Moreover, the video’s bit-rate tells you how much data and bits are compressed into one second of the video. The commonly used bit-rates range from 265kb/s (for video streaming) — 40Mbits/s (for BLU-RAY) depending on the quality and format.

What video encoding enables us to do is convert the video formats and sizes to different formats and sizes with different metadata to make the video more compatible to be hosted in every type of setting, and adapt to different bitrates to be accessible to the end user without any degrade in quality and speed. But it also has some cons which can be avoided by using some best practices which are common these days. For example, video should never be over compressed because it can result in the loss of quality. Other than that, format should be chosen considering the platform and the audience and audio should never be neglected. Moreover, the delivery method should also be taken into account before encoding to suit the environment.

Using good algorithms and tools to encode videos can help you get the best out of your video content. As a result, the video size gets shorter, the time it takes to transfer gets reduced by huge margins, there is no loss in quality when the users access the content from different devices as the video profiles and bit-rates adjust depending on the devices and the streaming speed increases which makes user stay on the video and the video ends up getting higher watch-times which is very beneficial for the company’s business.

Since the video content is being used in the industry for almost everything and is greatly being adapted by every company, the optimized storage and transfer of video data is turning into a necessity and as the user will not stay and wait on the web-page for the video to buffer nowadays, the video content delivery has to be smarter and efficient now to yield more watch time from the user.

Be it educational channels to entertainment channels like Netflix to tech giants like Google, everyone is investing in video encoders and encoding algorithms to optimize the video content as much as possible because as the amount of video increases, the space it takes also increases along with the bandwidth taken to transfer and stream it, so it has turned out to be a necessity to encode videos.

To conclude, the future of content marketing revolves around optimized video storage and streaming and to survive in the industry, every company must invest in robust and flexible encoding algorithms and solutions to ensure optimized and efficient video streaming.