Adaptive video streaming

Adaptive video streaming over HTTP is key to have videos load fast any where on any device. Filerobot can transcode your videos in multiple target resolutions and generate the playlist (also called manifest) for your DASH or HLS video player to consume. Before leveraging Filerobot's video transcoding capabilities, we recommend getting a basic understand of the technologies involved: adaptive streaming, DASH and HLS.

Video transcoding must be enabled on your Filerobot token, please contact us for activating it.

This article shows how to initiate video transcoding from the Asset hub. Alternatively, you can use the Transcode video API.

How does it work?

Obtaining transcoded chunks and the corresponding playlist file (.mpd for DASH and .m3u8 for HLS) for the video player to consume is achieved in 3 simple steps:

1. Upload origin video file: high resolution video file is uploaded into Filerobot via API, Asset Hub or Widget
2. Transcode into lower resolution chunks: Filerobot backend will generate transcoded chunks and store them in your storage container
3. Playlist generation: Filerobot generates the playlist file, stores it into your storage container and adds link to it to in the meta data of the original video file

Steps 2 and 3 are transparent for you, you just need to initiate the transcoding process from the Asset hub.

Initiating video transcode process

Video transcoding for a specific video can be initiated either upon file upload or on an existing asset:

Using video playlists

The link to the playlist can be accessed from Asset details -> Embed.

Supported formats and codecs