Transcoding Engine

The Transcoding Engine can help you in many ways. Here are a few useful use cases:

Downscaling Videos

It may be the case that the majority of your user base will record/upload videos using Android and the legacy mobile recorder. This combo will produce high-resolution videos (iOS compresses recordigns). In this case, most of the videos will have at least a full HD resolution (1920x1080).

These high-resolution videos will have a large size on disk which can cause a variety of issues (slower processing, larger storage being needed, buffering on playback, etc.). Setting the proper transcoding options can help you downscale the videos, making them smaller in size so that you can avoid those issues.

You can easily do this by following the steps:

  1. Go to the Transcoding section in the Pipe Account Dashboard
  2. Make sure Enable MP4 output is turned on
  3. For the resolution choose Scale down if needed to a maximum resolution and input the desired height, 720 for example.
  4. Save

In this case, any video with a higher height 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.

Fitting Videos into a Fixed-size Player

You may need your videos custom-fitted for a certain type of display/player.

This can easily be achieved with a few settings:

  1. Go to your transcoding section
  2. Make sure you have Enable MP4 output selected.
  3. Choose the aspect ratio that fits your use case and select to obtain that aspect ratio either by cropping the video or by adding black bars to it.
  4. 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.
  5. Save the settings.

This kind of setup will always produce videos of constant aspect ratio and resolution.

Transcribing Audio

You may need to transcribe the audio from your video and screen recordings, for meeting minutes or study transcriptions. This can be done by sending the audio to a speech-to-text service.

The transcoding engine can help you with this process by extracting the audio from the video and screen recordings.

To extract the audio follow these steps:

  1. Go to your transcoding section
  2. Scroll to the Extract Audio section and select Extract audio data into a separate file.
  3. Save the settings.

This will create a separate audio file for each recording. The filename will be STREAMNAME_audio.mp4. The audio will be converted to AAC. Number of channels and sample rate will not be changed.

The audio file will be pushed to the Pipe storage (if enabled) and to your own storage (if configured) together with all the other files related to a recording.

Last Modified on May 22, 2025