The Art of Transcoding

A lot of people might argue that the transcoding process isn’t the most electrifying of topics…but we aren’t those people.

The fact is, transcoding isn’t a science.  It’s an art.

So I sat down with Rikki Carls, Director of Software Architecture and the Picasso of Unicorn Media’s transcoding architecture to get the ins and outs of how the Unicorn transcoding system was built.

What did we set out to accomplish in building our transcoding architecture?

Rikki: We started with a couple of basic tenets in mind.  First, to encode videos to a world-class standard of quality at a lower bitrate than previously thought possible. Second, to have a dynamic profile system that would enable our customers to choose the video output that best meets their business needs, and lastly to create the architecture in such a way to allow it to scale-anywhere from a single hardware farm to multiple “cloud computing” infrastructures.

So, we know what we want the end result to look like.  Where did we go from there?

Rikki:  Well, to accomplish the first goal, we spent several months in research and development.  We needed to find the best H.264 encoder in terms of quality output, configurable settings, and ongoing development.  We then went though and “tweaked” every imaginable configurable setting combination until we found what we think of as the perfect combination of encoding speed, quality, and bitrate. We then ran a battery of test content through, making additional configuration changes until we were sure that we had the best quality encoding on the market at any given bitrate.

So we’ve got the basics down, how did we accomplish the dynamic profiles and scalability?

Rikki:  Our second and third goals were actually much easier to accomplish. Instead of relying on a prebuilt software package to do our encoding, our system was custom built in a modular fashion.  This not only allows us to quickly add new functionality on-the-fly, but also allows us to keep up with the ever-changing video codecs required to read and transcode the wide variety of video types we receive. On top of that, we can quickly scale out our infrastructure to meet any customer’s demand, from a small video publisher with a couple hundred assets up to a large syndication company with tens of thousands of assets.

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As Rikki mentioned, we set out to build a transcoding system that would bring our customers the highest standard of quality video at lower bitrates, and that’s exactly what we’ve done.  But you don’t have to take our word for it, the proof is in the pudding.  Head over to UnicornMedia.com and check out this video-quality comparison.