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videodb
VideoDB Documentation
  • Pages
    • Welcome to VideoDB Docs
    • Quick Start Guide
      • Video Indexing Guide
      • Semantic Search
      • How Accurate is Your Search?
      • Collections
      • Public Collections
      • Callback Details
      • Ref: Subtitle Styles
      • Language Support
      • Guide: Subtitles
    • Examples and Tutorials
      • Dubbing - Replace Soundtrack with New Audio
      • VideoDB x TwelveLabs: Real-Time Video Understanding
      • Beep curse words in real-time
      • Remove Unwanted Content from videos
      • Instant Clips of Your Favorite Characters
      • Insert Dynamic Ads in real-time
      • Adding Brand Elements with VideoDB
      • Eleven Labs x VideoDB: Adding AI Generated voiceovers to silent footage
      • Elevating Trailers with Automated Narration
      • Add Intro/Outro to Videos
      • Audio overlay + Video + Timeline
      • Building Dynamic Video Streams with VideoDB: Integrating Custom Data and APIs
      • AI Generated Ad Films for Product Videography: Wellsaid, Open AI & VideoDB
      • Fun with Keyword Search
      • AWS Rekognition and VideoDB - Effortlessly Remove Inappropriate Content from Video
      • Overlay a Word-Counter on Video Stream
      • Generate Automated Video Outputs with Text Prompts | DALL-E + ElevenLabs + OpenAI + VideoDB
    • Visual Search and Indexing
      • Scene Extraction Algorithms
      • Custom Annotations
      • Scene-Level Metadata: Smarter Video Search & Retrieval
      • Advanced Visual Search Pipelines
      • Playground for Scene Extractions
      • Deep Dive into Prompt Engineering : Mastering Video Scene Indexing
    • Multimodal Search
      • Multimodal Search: Quickstart
      • Conference Slide Scraper with VideoDB
    • Real‑Time Video Pipeline
      • Automated Traffic Violation Reporter
    • Meeting Recording SDK
    • Generative Media Quickstart
      • Generative Media Pricing
    • AI Video Editing Automation SDK
      • Fit & Position: Aspect Ratio Control
      • Trimming vs Timing: Two Independent Timelines
      • Advanced Clip Control: The Composition Layer
      • Caption & Subtitles: Auto-Generated Speech Synchronization
      • Notebooks
    • Transcoding Quickstart
    • director-light
      Director - Video Agent Framework
      • Agent Creation Playbook
      • How I Built a CRM-integrated Sales Assistant Agent in 1 Hour
      • Make Your Video Sound Studio Quality with Voice Cloning
      • Setup Director Locally
    • github
      Open Source Tools
      • llama
        LlamaIndex VideoDB Retriever
      • PromptClip: Use Power of LLM to Create Clips
      • StreamRAG: Connect ChatGPT to VideoDB
    • zapier
      Zapier Integration
      • Auto-Dub Videos & Save to Google Drive
      • Create & Add Intelligent Video Highlights to Notion
      • Create GenAI Video Engine - Notion Ideas to Youtube
      • Automatically Detect Profanity in Videos with AI - Update on Slack
      • Generate and Store YouTube Video Summaries in Notion
      • Automate Subtitle Generation for Video Libraries
      • Solve customers queries with Video Answers
    • n8n
      N8N Workflows
      • AI-Powered Meeting Intelligence: Recording to Insights Automation
      • AI Powered Dubbing Workflow for Video Content
      • Automate Subtitle Generation for Video Libraries
      • Automate Interview Evaluations with AI
      • Turn Meeting Recordings into Actionable Summaries
      • Auto-Sync Sales Calls to HubSpot CRM with AI
      • Instant Notion Summaries for Your Youtube Playlist
    • mcp
      VideoDB MCP Server
    • Edge of Knowledge
      • Building Intelligent Machines
        • Part 1 - Define Intelligence
        • Part 2 - Observe and Respond
        • Part 3 - Training a Model
      • Society of Machines
        • Society of Machines
        • Autonomy - Do we have the choice?
        • Emergence - An Intelligence of the collective
      • From Language Models to World Models: The Next Frontier in AI
      • The Future Series
      • How VideoDB Solves Complex Visual Analysis Tasks
    • videodb
      Building World's First Video Database
      • icon picker
        Multimedia: From MP3/MP4 to the Future with VideoDB
      • Dynamic Video Streams
      • Why do we need a Video Database Now?
      • What's a Video Database ?
      • Enhancing AI-Driven Multimedia Applications
      • Misalignment of Today's Web
      • Beyond Traditional Video Infrastructure
      • Research Grants
    • Customer Love
    • Team
      • videodb
        Internship: Build the Future of AI-Powered Video Infrastructure
      • Ashutosh Trivedi
        • Playlists
        • Talks - Solving Logical Puzzles with Natural Language Processing - PyCon India 2015
      • Ashish
      • Shivani Desai
      • Gaurav Tyagi
      • Rohit Garg
      • VideoDB Acquires Devzery: Expanding Our AI Infra Stack with Developer-First Testing Automation

Multimedia: From MP3/MP4 to the Future with VideoDB

Ashutosh Trivedi
Introduction
In the wide world of multimedia, terms like MP3, MP4, and codecs often float around. But what do they really mean? And how are emerging technologies like videoDB reshaping the landscape?
Let’s understand some basics 👇
The Basics: MP3 & MP4
At their core, MP4s are file containers primarily housing video and audio data.
Video Data: Think of video as a series of compressed image frames. For a 60fps video at 720p quality, without compression, we'd be storing full size 60 images of size 1280*720 for just one second of footage.
Audio Data: This is typically an aac/mp3 data stream, which is essentially compressed PCM (pulse code modulation) information of analog audio.
The Need for Compression
Compression is crucial for two main reasons:
Storage: Reducing the size of multimedia files for storage.
Transmission: Making it feasible to send large files over networks.
Various codecs, developed by giants like Apple, Microsoft, Google, and MPEG, handle this compression. These codecs, which stand for compressor/decompressor, encode and decode this data, a process that's quite CPU-intensive.
Transcoding is term used for conversion between codecs or to change/edit information in the video files. For e.g. you have a HD video (720p) and you want to convert it to 260p quality m4a to reduce size.
The Tools of the Trade
Transcoding is resource-heavy. While ffmpeg is a popular open-source solution, enterprise-grade transcoders, optimized for GPUs, offer faster performance. Nvidia, for instance, has a GPU tailored for transcoding, and AWS offers specialized instances at a premium.
Streaming: The Modern Delivery
Directly delivering large video files over the network is inefficient. Enter streaming 👉 a solution for Video on Demand (VOD) and Over The Top (OTT) content.
Apple's HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) is a prime example:
It breaks MP4s into smaller chunks, stored as .ts files.
An m3u8 file acts as a playlist or index for these chunks.
The video player requests chunks based on various factors, ensuring smooth playback.
While HLS dominates, alternatives like Adobe's HDS, MPEG DASH, and Microsoft Smooth Streaming also exist.
The AI-Driven Future
In our AI-centric world, customization is key! Traditional formats aren't adept at on-the-fly modifications, searches, or combinations of videos. For these tasks, a system would need to:
Smartly store information.
Understand user commands.
Retrieve, extract, and modify based on commands.
Encode this into a new MP4.
Convert this MP4 into a streamable format.
VideoDB bypasses the need for traditional MP4 creation and transcoding. This results in a massive speed advantage as there's no wait time for transcoding processes. Additionally, it offers a significant cost advantage, as transcoding, especially at scale, can be resource-intensive and expensive.
In conclusion, as the web continues to evolve, so does the way we consume and interact with media. VideoDB’s innovative approach promises a future where media is not just consumed but interacted with on a deeply personalized level.
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