video encoding

Video Encoding in ivory

Video encoding

Although the Ivory Player accepts all kind of videos, for the smoothest play experience it converts all the video’s to 3 output ‘flavours’. Before dropping the video on the timeline, Ivory first converts them into these 3 flavours. These flavours are web standard for these specific resolutions.


Adaptive resolution based on bandwidth

When the viewer presses the play button, the Ivory Player first sends some small files to the viewer to determine its bandwidth. Based on this it starts loading the highest quality of the videos with the smoothest play experience with this bandwidth. It will keep doing this throughout the entire video, so when the bandwidth changes, the quality changes accordingly in order to keep everything smooth.


Encoding flavour ouputs

Every browser limits the number of videos that will be preloaded simultaneously. The maximum differs per browser and version, but in general it is between the 6 and 10 clips at a time.  This means that when a viewer presses the play button, Ivory Player will preload at least the 6 first clips. At the time of writing this article, Google Chrome can load the most amount of videos simultaneously.


Resolution
1920x1080
1280x720
640x360
Container
MP4
MP4
MP4
Audiocodec
AAC
AAC
AAC
Videocodec
H.264
H.264
H.264
Framerate
30 fps
30 fps
30 fps
Bitrate
6 Mbps
2.5 Mbps
800 Kbps


Framerate

The Ivory Player converts all videos to a 30 fps framerate, even if you uploaded 25, 60 or other framerates. In the Ivory Editor and Ivory Player you won’t see any difference, as these work with seconds and microseconds, not with frames. So even if you have clips with different framerates, after the encoding the Ivory Editor and Player just see 1 seconds as one seconds, no matter what the framerate is.


Bitrate

The low bitrate, especially on the small resolution, might surprise you. This is because of the smart preloading process of the Ivory Player. By keeping the bitrate low it can easily preload multiple clips simultaneously resulting in the smoothest video experience. And as soon as the bandwidth goes up or the preloading is (partly) done, the Ivory Player will increase the resolution.