The default mental image of video compression involves unwanted video artifacts, like pixelation and blockiness in the image. This sells short, though, the complexity that actually goes into compressing video content. In particular, it overlooks a fascinating process called interframe, which involves keyframes and delta frames to intelligently compress content in a manner that is intended to go unnoticed.

This article describes this process in detail, while also giving best practices and ideal encoder settings that you can apply to your live streaming at IBM Cloud Video. Much of this specific advice relates to streaming due to adaptive bitrates.

FFAStrans is an unattended Windows tool aimed at broadcasters and video professionals for automatic transcoding of media files through drop folders. It's based on FFMpeg and relies on AviSynth for filters. Also it's one of the few free tools which supports multiple watch folder with separate transcoding configurations. It's best compared with the likes of Telestreams Episode and Vantage, Harmonics ProCoder, Digital Rapids Transcode Manager, Adobe Media Encoder, Amberfin iCR etc. FFAStrans is targeted at those with lots of different media formats coming from lots of different places and wants the transcoding process done automatically.

GUI for ffmpeg