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Media Distribution - Future proof your Masters
19th January 2010
The process of taking mainstream content and delivering it to mobile is a complex one. There are many variables to be accounted for in the areas of META data management, media transcoding
(or repurposing), device detection, DRM, billing, mobile storefronts and more. Before we get involved in the technicalities of each of these, I thought I would address the most important element, after the quality of the content itself, the quality of the Master.
As anyone who has recently taken a digital photo will know, the quality of your photograph is all about the CCD which translates loosely into MEGAPixels. The more you have the better your photo is likely to be when you finally upload that masterpiece to be turned into print. If you have taken digital photos for any length of time, you will also know that the photos you were taking on your 4 year old, 5 MEGApixel camera, are probably a little pixelated by today's standards. You will also notice that the image files are about 10 times larger than they used to be.
Now apply this situation to Digital Media. How do you ensure that your content will not 'age' allowing you to continue to produce a satisfactory output for an increasingly discerning audience with increasingly complex devices attached to an ever wider pipe?
Never compress your Masters!
For Image files, there are a wealth of formats that are open and commonly supported by any graphics processing library worthy of the name. Formats include RAW, uncompressed TIFF and PNG. Avoid lossy compressive formats such as JPEG and GIFF, which compress the contents of the image, irretrievably throwing away detail in the process.
Unlike visual media, audio presents its own challenges and benefits. Given the fixed spectrum the human ear can process, it is much easier to store audio than image and video media. Ensure that your audio is stored in an uncompressed format such as WAV, or in a lossless compressed format such as FLAC. I favor WAV, as subsequent processing which involves extracting sections of the audio down to fractions of a second cannot be done accurately on compressed formats.
Video is a complex progression of the situation. We demux (or split) the video and audio streams, saving the audio as a WAV and the video as a YUV. This gives maximum freedom to transcode from a solid base into many outputs, safe in the knowledge that they have come from the best possible source.
By storing Masters at the highest possible bit rates in lossless formats, we ensure maximum efficiency of the distribution process. We eliminate the need to go back to source as new, more capable, devices with larger screens and faster CPUs drive the adoption of more complex codecs which in turn drives consumer demand for greater quality.