How to Encode Video for Every Audience on Any Device

You've got great online video. Now you need to make sure everyone can see it.

At the recent Streaming Forum conference in London, encoding expert Jan Ozer walked attendees through a quick primer explaining the files they must create to reach viewers on all platforms.

"Producers need to distribute to all available streams to maximize their reach or the profitability of their video to computers, mobile, and OTT," Ozer said. "Most producers at this point are at least thinking about adaptive delivery if they're not already delivering adaptively. So, basically what I'm going to try to cover today is how to produce the fewest number of files that allow you to deliver adaptively to those three general platforms."

For anyone new to encoding, Ozer explained the how codecs are used to encode video, which is then wrapped in different formats for delivery.

"There's basically two aspects to this. It's kind of interesting. There's the encoding site, producing the files you need to get to the target, and then there's the packaging side: are you going to use Smooth Streaming, are you going to use Flash, are you going to use HLS?," Ozer asked.

The all-around all-purpose codec of the moment is H.264, so that's where Ozer spent most of his time.

"We'll start with H.264, because today H.264 is the only codec you can use to reach all these targets," Ozer explained. "Why H.264? It's the highest quality compression technology generally available today. It plays everywhere. Flash, QuickTime, and Silverlight are not universal in HTML5."

For more on encoding multiple streams, watch the full video below.

Troy Dreier's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net