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What Is Mobile Video Encoding?

By Jamie Simpson

Republish: EasyPublish™
Published: 29Dec2011
Word count: 524
Viewed: 128 time(s)

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The late Steve Jobs caused quite a stir when he elected not to include Flash video support on the iPhone. Flash was and still is the most common file format for use in Internet Applications and online video clips. Jobs' reasoning was that Flash was resource-hungry, buggy, and frequently crashed. His logic was hard to argue with. Without Flash, what would be used in place of it for online videos viewed from a mobile device? In order to understand how video can be played on smart phones without the use of Flash, one must understand mobile video encoding.

What Is Mobile Video Encoding?

Picture a situation where someone has downloaded a video file that uses the AVI format. In this hypothetical scenario, the person in question doesn't have a media player capable of playing AVI files. To watch the video clip, he or she would have to re-encode it into a format that the media player can recognize. Mobile video encoding is simply a way to format a video file such that most any mobile device can play it. There are a number of tools one could use to do this, and just as many video format files available on the market.

Mobile Video Codecs

Codec is a shorthand term which stands for compression-decompression. It's a program that interprets a video or audio file so that the contents can be accessed. Common codecs include H.264, Ogg Theora, FLV, AVI, and WebM. The search for the perfect codec for mobile video delivery has been going on for the last few years, and there are plenty of candidates to become the new de facto format for online video. H.264 is the most popular at the moment, but WebM has been gaining popularity lately.

How To Encode Video For Mobile Devices

In order to upload a video to the web so that millions of people worldwide can watch it and enjoy it on any device, it has to be in a format that's universally recognized. Flash negates the possibility of viewers catching it on their iPhones. One would need to encode it using one of the many programs capable of transforming it into a format that any mobile player can understand. For a more thorough synopsis of the encoding process, consult one the many guides to codecs and encoding mobile video found on the web.

Final Thoughts

It's an exciting time to be alive in terms of mobility and technological innovation. Smart phones allow people to download and view media from any location. Mobile video is more lightweight, more compact, and just as crisp as the Flash-based content that dominated the PC era. The coming year will bring even more change as new codecs and formats vie for the attention of mobile device users. HTML5 video in particular is an intriguing new technology that's still in the early stages, but holds a lot of promise. Regardless of what happens, the encoding of mobile content will only continue to get better as the months pass.

Find out more about mobile video encoding.

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