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Captain Encoder

Captain Encoder is a media transcoding service hosted in the cloud.It is designed to be a highly scalable, reliable and cost effective way for developers or businesses to transcode or convert media files from their source format into versions that will playback on a wide range of devices.

Captain Encoder lets you convert media files that may be stored in any storing system, which has public access enabled, into media files in the formats dictated by the consumer playback devices. For an instance you can convert high-quality and large digital media files into formats that users can play back on a variety of internet-connected devices such as mobile devices, tablets, connected televisions or web browsers. To ensure high video quality, Captain offers a video transcoding service where administrators are able to configure video encoding to meet proper formats and specifications for multi-screen display via either a web interface or API.

Captain Encoder is a file-based video transcoding service with broadcast-grade features. It allows you to easily create video-on-demand (VOD) content for broadcast and multiscreen delivery at scale. The service combines advanced video and audio capabilities with simple web services interface and API With Captain Encoder, you can focus on delivering compelling media experiences without having to worry about the complexity of building and operating your own video processing infrastructure.

Captain Encoder handles automatically all aspects of the media transcoding process in a transparently manner. In other words there is no need to manage the transcoding infrastructure such as scaling hardware or tuning perfomance.You simply create a transcoding job specifying the location of your source media file and how you want it transcoded. Captain Encode also provides transcoding presets for popular output formats, which means that you don't need to guess about which settings work best on a particular devices.

Captain Live Encoder

Captain Live Encoder is a real-time video service that lets you create live outputs for broadcast and streaming delivery. It is a new feature that allows you to even encode live streams.

Live Encoder is able to deploy anywhere and deliver everywhere encoded solutions. It processes video and audio in real time for streaming to internet connected devices, for broadcasting and multiscreen delivery at scale. Live makes it simple to compress your videos in multiple versions for distributions; including different qualities, segment control and length . It is easy to use and configure, reliable, high quality live encoding within the studio, inside remote facilities or on any location. You can control live via web interface or API for easy integration and appliance, cloud based, virtual deployment. Easy to update software lets you keep pace with features and standards as screens, devices and viewer expectations changes.

Functionality#

There are several reasons that transcoding services have been complex for customers to use. First, customers need to buy and manage transcoding software, which tends to be very expensive and quite challenging to maintain and configure. Also producing transcoded output for different kinds of devices often is associated with the process of trial and error to find the right transcoding setting that can be played properly and also look good to the end user. This trial and error process wastes compute resources. There is the issue of scaling up and down with the customers' business needs. Instead, with traditional solutions, customers need to guess how much capacity to provision ahead of time, which indicates that the user may waste money, in case when they provision too much and leave capacity underutilized, or on the other hand delay their business if they provision too little.

Captain aims to address these issues by simply using the web interface or service API to create a transcoding job that specifies an input file, the transcoding settings and output files. This simple procedure proposes a better solution that addresses all the issues above. First, there is no need to buy, configure or manage underlying transcoding software. Also Captain Encoder has pre-defined presets for various devices that remove the need to find the right settings for different devices through trial and error. Also the system also supports custom presets which let customers tune output to specific transcode requirements such as a specific bit rate or framerate. Finally Encoder automatically scales up and down to handle customers' workloads, eliminating wasted capacity and minimizing time spent waiting for jobs to complete.

Captain Encoder terminology#

This section describes key concepts you need to understand in order to use Captain Encoder effectively.

Job#

  • The purpose of transcoding jobs is actually transcoding a media file from one format into another format. You can use one job to create multiple output files of different bit rates and formats from a single input file. For example, one job could create renditions consisting of different resolutions and bitrates of the same input file. You can also create an audio-only alternate stream, which is frequently used when creating an HLS or MPEG-DASH file set. Upon creation, you specify the information that the GjirafaTech Captain Encoder needs to know in order to perform the transcoding; which file to transcode, what to name the transcoded output files and which preset to use.

System transcoding presets#

  • Captain Encoder provides a set of transcoding presets that removes the troublesome part of figuring the right transcoding settings for different devices. You can choose from presets that will create output that is compatible with any device or from presets that target specific devices.

Custom transcoding presets#

  • The transcoding presets that we present are harmonious to most devices and platforms, but some customers may need to create specific presets that targets a particular output target.

Template#

  • Templates speed up your job setup by providing groups of recommended transcoding settings. It applies to an entire transcoding job. You can use a system job template which is provided by the GjirafaTech Captain Encoder with settings specified for you, or you can create a custom job template with your own settings.