Video In Your App: Is Transcoding Necessary?

Do videos within apps need to be transcoded? Answer: it depends. If videos are recorded and played only within your app then probably not. But if you're looking to record or play certain videos elsewhere (i.e. across all browsers and devices) -- yes, they do need to be transcoded. They'll need to be transcoded into 3 different formats: as an mp4, webm and ogv. Otherwise, videos recorded e.g. on an iPhone won't be able to be played back from a browser. And videos recorded from a browser can't be played on all other browsers or devices. The upshot: if your videos don't just live within one app, your videos need to be transcoded.