{"id":21973,"date":"2019-10-29T13:21:02","date_gmt":"2019-10-29T13:21:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/automatic_video_transcoding"},"modified":"2025-03-02T14:39:43","modified_gmt":"2025-03-02T22:39:43","slug":"automatic_video_transcoding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloudinary.com\/blog\/automatic_video_transcoding","title":{"rendered":"Automatic Video Transcoding With Cloudinary"},"content":{"rendered":"

Delivering video files<\/a> to users can be a much more complex undertaking than many people stop to consider. There are a large variety of video formats and codecs to choose between, and various optimization parameters for encoding the videos<\/a>. Parameters such as bitrate, key-frame-interval, and frame-rate<\/a> will have an effect on the visual quality and bandwidth requirements when delivering the video file. To make matters worse, there are so many potential viewing devices out there (desktops, laptops, tablets, mobiles, wearables, etc). Each of these devices have different browsers or apps, and they all support different formats and codecs!<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, there is no single format or codec that is ideal for all end users. Selecting a format and codec that is supported by all browsers and devices will actually affect quality and user-experience. Since some formats are better than others at compression and reducing the file size without impairing visual quality, the best solution to save bandwidth and optimize delivery time would be to deliver the best format according to the browser used by each of your visitors.<\/p>\n

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(Image courtesy of https:\/\/www.w3counter.com\/globalstats.php<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Introducing Automatic Video Transcoding<\/h2>\n

Let Cloudinary do the job of automatically selecting the best codec and format for you. The automatic format selection feature for images<\/a> has now been extended to offer the same functionality for videos as part of our Dynamic Video Platform solution. Cloudinary identifies the end-user device and browser and then delivers the best video format and codec for that particular user. The feature currently supports selecting between the H.264, HEVC and VP9<\/a> codecs and is future-proofed for adding next-generation codecs such as AV1.<\/p>\n

So take the complexity out of managing videos because adding this functionality is as simple as adding the fetch_format<\/code> parameter set to auto<\/em> (f_auto<\/code> in URLs). This tells Cloudinary to perform automatic format and codec selection based on the requesting browser. For example, with the automatic video format feature, in most cases Chrome users would receive a VP9-encoded WebM file, while Safari users would receive an HEVC-encoded MP4 file. If a requesting browser does not support either of these formats, then the video would be delivered as an H-264 encoded MP4 file, which is supported by almost every browser.<\/p>\n

For example, the kitten_playing<\/code> video is scaled down to a width of 500 pixels and delivered as:<\/p>\n