Transcoding Engine
The Transcoding Engine can help you in many ways. Here are a few useful use cases:
Downscale Videos
In some use cases, a significant number of users will upload video recordings using an Android device and the legacy mobile recorder. This combo will produce high-resolution videos (iOS, on the other hand, will significantly compress recordings). In this case, most video recordings will have full HD resolution (1920x1080) or higher.
These high-resolution videos will be quite large, which can cause various issues, including slower processing, increased storage requirements, and playback buffering. Using the Transcoding Engine, you can downscale the videos, making them smaller in size, thereby avoiding these issues.
You can easily do this by following the steps:
- Go to the Transcoding section in the Pipe Account Dashboard.
- Make sure Enable MP4 output is turned on.
- For the resolution, choose Scale down if needed to a maximum resolution, and input the desired height, 720 for example.
- Save.
In this case, any video with a height higher than 720px will be downscaled to 720px. The aspect ratio will be left unchanged unless set otherwise. Videos with a lower resolution won’t be downscaled.
Force an Aspect Ratio
You may need your videos to fit a particular display or video player perfectly. In that case, you’ll want your recordings to have the same aspect ratio.
This can be easily achieved by forcing an aspect ratio. Here’s how you can do it:
- Go to the Transcoding section in the Pipe Account Dashboard.
- Make sure Enable MP4 output is turned on.
- Under video aspect ratio, choose the one that fits your use case and select how to obtain it: crop the video or add black bars to it.
- Finally, you can select I want every video scaled (up or down) to a fixed resolution and set a custom height to make sure the videos will always have the same resolution.
- Save.
Such a setup will always produce videos of constant aspect ratio and resolution.
Extract Audio as a Separate File
You may need to transcribe the audio from your video and screen recordings, for meeting minutes or study transcriptions. Some services will allow you to transcribe video files directly, but most of the time, it is cheaper and faster to transcribe audio, and you won’t hit any file size limits.
The Transcoding Engine can help you with this process by extracting the audio track from video and screen recordings. To extract the audio as a separate .mp4 audio file, follow these steps:
- Go to the Transcoding section in the Pipe Account Dashboard.
- Scroll to the Extract Audio section and select Extract audio data into a separate file.
- Save.
This setup will create a separate audio file for each recording. The filename will be STREAMNAME_audio.mp4. The audio will be converted to AAC. The number of channels and sample rate will not be changed.
The audio file will be pushed to the Pipe’s complimentary storage (if enabled) and to your own storage (if configured), together with all the other files related to a recording.
On a related note, also check out our audio transcribing integrations and demos: