Transcoding

Transcoding is the direct analog-to-analog or digital-to-digital conversion of one encoding to another, such as for movie data files (e.g., PAL, SECAM, NTSC), audio files (e.g., MP3, WAV), or character encoding (e.g., UTF-8, ISO/IEC 8859). 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 just 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 compression performance than other lossless coding technologies, and in many cases, JPEG2000 can compress images to half-size.

Transcode (software)

Transcode is a free audio/video transcoder with a command-line interface for Unix-like operating systems. It uses FFmpeg's libavcodec library, and supports numerous formats (such as DV, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, H.264, PVN as well as all the formats supported by libavcodec). It also includes a variety of pre/post filters for denoising, deinterlacing, smoothing, sharpening, etc. As for container formats, transcode was designed around AVI, and support for output to more modern container formats is still limited. For example, current versions of transcode do not support multiplexing into the popular MP4 container format; external tools must be used instead. Besides the main transcoding tool (the transcode executable itself), the package also contains a number of tools (avimerge, avisplit, tccat, tcextract etc.) for (de)multiplexing, concatenation, and other similar operations on multimedia files and streams.

Transcode was first released in 2001. It was developed for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. There is no version for Microsoft Windows, and the developers have no plans to create one.

Transcode (character encoding)

Transcode, or Transmission Code, was a 6-bit plus parity BCD character set which was used by IBM for a short time for Binary Synchronous communications. The IBM 2780 data transmission terminal was announced with Transcode support in 1967. The IBM 3780 data communication terminal, the 2780 successor announced in 1972, dropped Transcode support.

Transcode was a 64 character set including twenty-six upper case alphabetic characters, ten numerics, thirteen special characters, and sixteen control characters. Characters were transmitted with odd parity.

Devices using Transcode

References