Transcoding: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 02:55, 10 June 2006

Revision as of 20:52, 19 June 2006

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Transcoding can also refer to recompressing files to a lower bitrate without changing formats.

[[Compression artifact]]s are cumulative, therefore transcoding between lossy codecs causes a progressive loss of quality with each successive generation. For this reason, it is generally discouraged unless unavoidable. For instance, if an individual owns a [[digital audio player]] that does not support a particular format (e.g., [[Apple Computer|Apple]] [[iPod]] and [[Ogg Vorbis]]), then the only way for the owner to use content encoded in that format is to transcode it to a supported format. It is better to retain a copy in a lossless format (such as [[TTA]], [[FLAC]] or [[WavPack]]), thenthan to encode directly from the lossless source file to the lossy formats required.

==References==