Monday, December 12, 2022

Madlad.tv now supports client side transcoding. This means that you can watch any format of video without downloading the media server.

What is "transcoding"

Video files come in a wide array of formats, such as .mp4, .mov, .avi, and .mkv. Not all of these formats are supported by all browsers. To solve this problem, it is common to convert the video file into a format that is supported by all browsers. This process is called "transcoding".

What is "client side transcoding"

Traditional streaming sites like YouTube and Twitch use their own servers to distribute media. To accomplish this, they allow users to upload video content in any format, and then transcode the content to a format supported by all browsers on their servers.

Madlad does not directly distrubute any of the content that can be consumed by the service. Instead, we use the BitTorrent protocol to distribute content. This means that the content is distributed by the users themselves. This is a much more efficient way to distribute content, but it also means that we cannot transcode the content on our servers.

To get around this limitation, we've implemented client side transcoding where necessary. This means that if you are watching a video that is not supported by your browser, we will transcode the video on your device.

This experience should be seemless, but isn't without some drawbacks.

Transcoding is expensive

Generally speaking, transcoding is an expensive process. You may experience choppy playback or buffering when consuming some content while on a lower end device.

To get around this limitation, download the Madlad Media Server to enable transcoding on your server instead. This will move both the torrent download, and the transcoding process to your server, which will result in a much smoother experience.