Product User Community

Transcoding Assets

January 01, 2020
Deltek, Inc
Deltek

Overview

The typical end-user will produce and interact with a wide variety of different file formats during the course of their work, which may need to be accessible within ConceptShare either as reference material, or as assets in need of annotations, reviews, and approvals.


To learn about how these assets are made available to users within ConceptShare, refer to the article on Asset Ingestion.

In order to allow a user to be able to view and work with a wide variety of file formats; ConceptShare supports a growing list of video, audio, image, and animation formats. ConceptShare uses transcoding in order to make the various uploaded file formats accessible to users within the context of a web application. For example, web browsers do not have native support displaying desktop application formats such as Powerpoint .pptx, Word .docx files, or .mov video files. The table below shows a sample of file formats categorized by type:


Text Audio Video Image Animationm
DOCX AC3 MP4 BMP SWF
TXT MP3 AVI PSD HTML5*
RTF WAV MOV TIFF

Once an asset is uploaded, behind the scenes, the ConceptShare background service queue will kickoff a process to convert (transcode) the original file whose format is not supported by browsers to another format which is browser compatible. The secondary file is referred to as a proxy file.


ConceptShare Transcoding Proxy File Diagram


Transcoded proxy file format by category

Text Audio Video Image Animation
PDF AAC MP4 container
H.264/AAC		 PNG MP4 with
H.264/AAC

192kbps
128kbps
64kbps		 1080p
720p
320p		 GIF and JPEG
are supported directly
by the browser

Video / Audio

When video and audio files are uploaded, multiple proxy versions of the asset are created corresponding to high, medium, and low quality playback settings.

Optimization


NOTE: uploaded assets that are already in the proxy format will not need transcoding, and therefore bypass this phase. Preprocessing files to the correct format prior to upload can save significant processing time in upload, processing completion time.

CAUTION: Transcoding time and resource loads vary depending on file-type and size. For PDFs and Images, this can be measured in seconds or minutes, while larger video files, can take hours to transcode. Transcoding files is generally a highly resource intensive process, demanding both infrastructure and taking time. It's therefore of great significance to optimize the process of asset ingestion such that minimal transcoding is required. As noted above; if your integration involves components (such as Digital Asset Management) or services which already provide transcoding capabilities, you may be able to realize significant gains in performance by configuring those systems to provide files to ConceptShare already in the proxy format, bypassing ConceptShare's transcoding service.

This is beneficial as users will not have to wait while the background service transcodes assets prior to their being ready for use, resulting in a more fluid and efficient experience for end-users.
Deltek, Inc
Deltek