How to bulk convert your videos to MP4 and WEBM online
Bulk convert your short videos (up to 5 minutes) to optimized MP4 and WEBM
versions, ready for responsive web delivery.
1
Choose your formats
Set MP4 for universal device support, WEBM to generate a variant with a highly efficient
VP9 encoding, HEVC for high efficient MP4 (mainly for Apple devices), or even JPEG to create a poster image
for your video.
2
Set your resolutions
Configure as many derivatives and different resolutions as needed. Cange the video aspect
ratio -cropping or padding- for several derivatives to share on different social media, or even watermark
some variants.
3
Upload your videos
Automatically convert your videos from any format, uploading your short clips (up to 5
minutes long), and download the MP4 and WEBM versions ready to publish in your web or share on your social
media.
Upload your short videos (up to 5 minutes long) in virtually any
format -from Apple ProRes to H264 Hi444-, and automatically get your MP4, and the high
efficient WEBM and HEVC derivatives. Deliver the best quality in the minimum bandwidth
with versions optimized to the whole range of user devices and browsers. Even get the
HTML5 poster image with an optimum compression for web in a single step.
Directly convert your digital masters to deliverable versions ready
for web, efortless.
Batch convert and resize videos
Set different video resolutions to deliver a responsive and mobile first
media experience. By creating and delivering several video variants with decreasing resolutions
you will be able to minimize the bandwidth consumption on mobile devices, avoiding stalling
and rebuffering issues in mobile connections, improving the quality of experience of your users.
Create several video variants to optimize bandwidth and video quality for
every device.
Batch video processing API
Easily integrate video conversion, optimization, resizing, and editing in
your web development workflows with Abraia video API. It provides integrations in the main
languages for web development and CLI integration. In combination with our online tools for
visual editing and management, the video conversion API allows to automate the creation and
management of all the video derivatives needed for a responsive web and for your social media
workflows.
Abraia automates and simplifies your video post-processing operations
for web and social media.
Convert videos for web
When preparing our videos for web, we should consider different aspects regarding format,
resolution, and quality. This means converting the high quality master video from the whatever
format used for video editing (like ProRes) to MP4, preserving the quality and avoiding
undesired degradation or artifacts in general. It is also icreasing popular the creation
of additional derivatives coded with VP9 and HEVC.
Moreover, a clean color management is essential to avoid undesired surprises with colors.
Otherwise, we may end up with video colors that change when viewed in a browser or app. In a
web context, this means working with videos in the BT.709 color specification end-to-end. This
is the safe color space, sharing the primary chromaticities with sRGB, the standard color space
for web.
Video resolutions for web
Compared to images, videos result in a much higher consumption of bandwidth. If images are
to be delivered responsively, even more so the videos. Delivering a heavy FullHD version to be
rendered in a small viewport is pointless. We should define breakpoints that ensure a proper
coverage of our audience, bearing in mind our layout and types of videos.
We don't need to zoom in videos and details are less perceptible in the presence of movement.
So we'll tipically use a lower maximum resolution for videos compared to images. In many cases
-like ecommerce sites-, we'll likely use product and marketing videos with custom aspect ratios.
A straightforward approach for defining video sizes is to set the short side of the video with
typical breakpoints -that is 360px, 480px, 720px, 1080px, 1440px- and set the other side
accordingly.
Video compression for web
As we compress videos more and more agressively we'll notice increasing visual artifacts
(blur, blocking, mosquito) that damage the quality of experience (QoE) of our users. As well,
if we fall short of compressing the video, we'll risk to bloat their connection. Again, we'll
damage their QoE due to low page speed or video stalling and rebufering. So we need to put an
optimization strategy in place that fits our content.
Compression codecs support different coding strategies by setting a number of quality-related
parameters. Two important parameters are the bitrate and the crf. The first can be used to assure
the bandwidth used by the video and the second is a proxy for visual quality.
Setting a fixed bitrate isn't generally a good practice. Depending on the content of the video
-slow vs sudden movements, fine textures vs solid colors-, we'll need different bitrates for a
target visual quality. So setting a fixed bitrate means wasting bandwidth with some videos and
damaging visual quality in others. While a policy based on crf assures the visual quality in most
cases, it risks producing bitrate peaks in videos with sudden or fast movements in which the
underlying metric becomes unstable.
Ideally, an optimization strategy better assures a target visual quality, avoiding bitrate
peaks, under different optimization criteria.
Convert to MP4, H264 profile
Back in 2003 in the beginning of the standard H264, three profiles were defined to cope with
the diversity of devices and their computational power: Baseline, Extended, and Main. Each
profile supports increasingly complex features that improve compression efficiency but also
require a higher computational effort. A fourth -more powerful- High profile was introduced in
2005, requiring even more computational capacity.
Today H264 is the coding standard universally supported across devices, systems, and browsers.
Any current device supports the four H264 profiles and is capable to decode them in real time
without problem. This means there is no reason to use the less eficient profiles for encoding.
When converting for the web, we should stick to encoding H264 videos with the High profile.
Convert to WebM VP9 and HEVC
In some cases, especially when we deliver heavy Full HD videos we may be interested in using
more recent and powerful encoding specifications like VP9 (WebM) for Android and Chrome users
or H265/HEVC for MacOS and iOS users. These encodings will feature a higher compression efficiency
reducing the bitrate by about a 30% for the same visual quality. But, similarly to H264, we should
have an optimization strategy in place with a visual quality target shared among codecs.
You can easily use Abraia to convert your videos to an optimized MP4 version. Moreover, you can
create all the encoding WebM and HEVC derivatives and variants corresponding to different
breakpoints.
