Transcoding

Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital conversion of one encoding to another, such as for video files, audio files, or character encoding. This is usually done in cases where a target device (or workflow) does not support the format or has limited storage capacity that mandates a reduced file size, or to convert incompatible or obsolete data to a better-supported or modern format.

In the analog video world, transcoding can be performed while files are being searched, as well as for presentation. For example, Cineon and DPX files have been widely used as a common format for digital cinema, but the data size of a two-hour movie is about 8 terabytes (TB). That large size can increase the cost and difficulty of handling movie files. However, transcoding into a JPEG2000 lossless format has better data compression performance than other lossless coding technologies; in many cases, JPEG2000 can compress images to half their original size.

Transcoding is commonly a lossy process, introducing generation loss; however, transcoding can be lossless if the output is either losslessly compressed or uncompressed. The process of transcoding into a lossy format introduces varying degrees of generation loss, while the transcoding from lossy to lossless or uncompressed is technically a lossless conversion because no information is lost; however, when the conversion is irreversible, it is then more correctly known as destructive.

Process

Transcoding is a two-step process in which the original data is decoded to an intermediate uncompressed format (e.g., PCM for audio; YUV for video), which is then encoded into the target format.

Re-encoding/recoding

One may also re-encode data in the same format, for a number of reasons:

Editing

If one wishes to edit data in a compressed format (for instance, perform image editing on a JPEG image), one will generally decode it, edit it, then re-encode it.