Editing Transcoding (section)

==Usage==
Although transcoding can be found in many areas of content adaptation, it is commonly used in the area of [[mobile phone]] content adaptation. In this case, transcoding is a must, due to the diversity of [[mobile device]]s and their capabilities. This diversity requires an intermediate state of content adaptation in order to make sure that the source content will adequately function on the target device to which it is sent.

Transcoding video from most consumer [[digital cameras]] can reduce the file size significantly while keeping the quality about the same. This is possible because most consumer cameras are [[Real-time_computing|real-time]], power-constrained devices having neither the processing power nor the robust power supplies of desktop CPUs.

One of the most popular technologies in which transcoding is used is the [[Multimedia Messaging Service]] (MMS), which is the technology used to send or receive messages with media (image, sound, text and video) between mobile phones. For example, when a camera phone is used to take a digital picture, a high-quality image of usually at least 640x480 [[pixels]] is created. When sending the image to another phone, this high resolution image might be transcoded to a lower resolution image with fewer colors in order to better fit the target device's screen size and color limitations. This size and color reduction improves the user experience on the target device, and is sometimes the only way for content to be sent between different mobile devices.

Transcoding is extensively used by [[home theatre PC]] software to reduce the usage of [[disk space]] by video files.  The most common operation in this application is the transcoding of [[MPEG-2]] files to the [[MPEG-4]] or [[H.264]] format.

Real-time transcoding in a many-to-many way (any input format to any output format) is becoming a necessity to provide true search capability for any multimedia content on any mobile device, with over 500 million videos on the web and a plethora of mobile devices.