Open Source Transcoding or Transcoding Service?

VIMP supports Open Source Transcoding and a professional Transcoding Service. In the following we describe the differences.

Open Source Transcoding

The VIMP Open Source Transcoding plugin is the default transcoding engine and transcodes the uploaded videos with the help of the open source tool ffmpeg into the MP4 format for playback with the VIMP HTML5 or Flash player and optionally to M4V, OGV and/or WEBM for playback on mobile devices or as an alternative HTML5 format (but OGV and WEBM are no longer required for modern web browers and thus are disabled in VIMP by default).

In VIMP versions prior to 3.6 you can choose between three pre-defined quality settings and enter a custom bitrate, which is important, if you change the default resolution (which is 720px in width and auto height).

The pre-defined quality settings have the following bitrate values:

Good quality: Video: 1200 kbit/s, Audio: 256 kbit/s maximum
Normal quality: Video: 800 kbit/s, Audio: 192 kbit/s maximum
Low quality: Video: 400 kbit/s, Audio: 128 kbit/s maximum

Additionally you can include individual ffmpeg preset files: https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html#ffpreset-files

As of VIMP 3.6 you can no longer select a quality setting. 

The new default values are as follows:
Desktop format: Video 2000 kbit/s, Audio: 160 kbit/s
Smartphone format: Video 1000 kbit/s, Audio: 96 kbit/s

But all bitrates can be adapted individually now.

In addition, you can define any number of additional formats with custom resolutions and bitrates from now on, which can be selected within the VIMP player. Go to Media -> Formats within the backend of VIMP to manage your additional formats.

The transcoding tools ffmpeg, ffprobe and exiftool have to be installed locally on your web server for every version of VIMP.

 

Transcoding Service (with costs, billing based on transcoding minutes)

With the VIMP Transcoding Service the transcoding process is not carried out locally on your VIMP web server, but in our cloud-based transcoding environment.

We can tweak the settings considerably more individual for you with the Transcoding Service than with the open source transcoding tools. In addition to FLV, MP4, M4V, OGV and WEBM you can have even more output formats.

Transcoding is not done with open source codecs, but with professional high-quality codecs. 

Due to the cloud environment, multiple videos can be transcoded in parallel and thus come back faster to your VIMP portal. In addition, your web server will be relieved as it doesn't have to carry out the CPU-intensive transcoding process.

Visit our Transcoding Service page for more information.