Online video streaming has a lot to do with the speed and quality of the video. It is not an easy task to deliver the content seamlessly. It does require technology to give you the content at the time of the request without any buffering. Video technology has evolved way too much in the past few years. Increased internet penetration and decreased cost of electronic devices are among the factors that lead to this development.
Videos are quite heavy in size. It is made of a large collection of still images. These bulky files are difficult to share seamlessly. Video encoding has come up as a solution to solve the issue of transferring heavy files. In layman’s terms, video encoding helps in converting the RAW video file to a streamable one. These files can be stored and transferred from one place to another.
What Does Encoding Mean?
All of us are aware that original video files are quite heavy in size. This happens since the video is a collection of still images. And for a recorded video of 25 frames per second, there are 25 photos per second. This in short means 1500 photos per second which will be too heavy to be delivered in 1 minute.
The most appropriate solution in this scenario is to compress the file which may lead to quality degradation of the video file. Video encoding helps in compressing the file size without compromising the quality of the video. In short, video encoding helps in compressing mammoth files into a more manageable format.
What Does Decoding Mean?
Decoding is a crucial part of video encoding yet is equally the opposite of it. It is the process of opening the data file that has been compressed by encoding. All in all, it unpacks the data that was compressed at the time of encoding for transmission.
For online video streaming, the role of decoding is served by the video player. And the quality and efficiency of the streaming video depend largely on the video player. Encoders and decoders work together to stream the content over the internet.
Video Compression And It’s Working
Video compression becomes important to reduce the size of the video file. Encoding helps in making that possible. This is all done by segregating which frames are essential and which are not. In layman’s terms, if some frames are similar to each other, getting rid of one frame can save space and speed up the delivery of the content. Compression of a video is done using codecs. It is an amalgamation of coder and decoder that helps in reducing the size of the video files and makes them more manageable to deliver over the internet.
Video encoding has made seamless delivery of on-demand content and real-time streaming possible. Without codecs, it would be a task to deliver the huge video files over the online streaming platform.
