Encoding profile presets

• Available presets
  • MP4 (H.264)
  • WebM (VP8)
  • OGG (Theora)
  • HTTP Live Streaming (iOS Adaptive Streaming)
  • MP3
  • M4A (AAC)
  • OGA (Vorbis)
• Add an H264 profile
• Add Watermarking
• Create Thumbnails
• Complete settings

Panda provides several encoding profile presets which make it easy to setup the correct output formats for your videos.

To manage your profiles

1. Log into your Panda Dashboard
2. Select your cloud
3. Click on the Profiles Tab
4. Click Add profile and you'll be able to select from one of the recommended presets.

Available presets

Below you'll find details about the presets available:

MP4 (H.264)

H.264 video with AAC audio for playback on HTML5 browsers, desktop players, Flash, iPhone (3GS and above) and iPad. Use H264 baseline to support most of phones like first iPhone's and Blackberry's.

WebM (VP8)

VP8 video with Ogg Vorbis audio for playback in HTML5 compatible browsers.

OGG (Theora)

Theora video with Ogg Vorbis audio for playback in HTML5 compatible browsers.

HTTP Live Streaming (iOS Adaptive Streaming)

Special multi-bitrate segmented video for streaming to Apple devices.

Create a Master playlist profile that will list all sub-streams into one file.

Then create a profile for each sub-stream of your Master Playlist.

iOS devices will streams the best variant depending on the quality of the phone signal. See Apple's recommendation for more details.

You can create different playlists (one for iPhone one for iPad). Only the profiles with their names matching the variant attribute will be added to the playlist.

# Sub streams
Panda::Profile.create!({
  :name => "hls.iphone.400k"
  :preset_name => "hls.variant",
  :video_bitrate => 400
})
Panda::Profile.create!({
  :name => "hls.iphone.600k"
  :preset_name => "hls.variant",
  :video_bitrate => 600
})
Panda::Profile.create!({
  :name => "hls.ipad.1200k"
  :preset_name => "hls.variant",
  :video_bitrate => 1200
})
Panda::Profile.create!({
  :name => "hls.audio"
  :preset_name => "hls.variant.audio",
})

# iPhone and iPad Playlist
Panda::Profile.create!({
  :name => "iphone",
  :preset_name => "hls.variant.playlist",
  :variants => "hls.iphone*,hls.audio"
})
Panda::Profile.create!({
  :name => "ipad",
  :preset_name => "hls.variant.playlist",
  :variants => "hls.iphone*,hls.ipad*,hls.audio"
})

MP3

MP3 audio preset.

M4A (AAC)

MP4 audio preset.

OGA (Vorbis)

Ogg Vorbis audio preset.

Add an H264 profile

Panda gives you complete control of presets using the API and the available libraries. For this, simply pass the preset_name attribute instead of the command attribute.

In ruby it would look like this

Panda::Profile.create!({
  :preset_name => "h264", # A valid preset name, as per the tables above
  :name => "my-h264", # Unique name for this profile
  :h264_crf => 23,
  :h264_profile => "baseline",
  :h264_level => "3.0",
  :width => "480",
  :height => "320"
})

Add Watermarking

You may want to add watermarking to your encodings. Use the api to set the url and the position of a remote image to use as a watermark.

Panda::Profile.create!({
  :name => "h264",
  :preset_name => "h264",
  :width => 480,
  :height => 320,
  :watermark_url => "http://www.pandastream.com/images/panda_logo.png",
  :watermark_bottom => 5,
  :watermark_right => 5
})

Create Thumbnails

You have two ways of creating thumbnails.

• Each encodings create 7 screenshots by default. They are evenly spaced, captured directly from the encoding output, which means they have exactly the same dimensions and quality as your encoding. You can update the size of the capture set using the frame_count attribute.

Panda::Profile.create!({
  :preset_name => "h264",
  ....
  :frame_count => 5
})

Screenshots will be generated and uploaded to the S3 bucket with the name using the following convention: $path$_$screenshot_number$.jpg e.g. (my-path/2f8760b7e0d4c7dbe609b5872be9bc3b_4.jpg).

• You can either create a Thumbnail profile. Thumbnails are performed directly on the original video. You can modify the format, size, the aspect mode and the rate.

Panda::Profile.create!({
  :preset_name => "thumbnail",
  ....
  :extname => '.jpg', # or .png
  :frame_interval => "300f",
  :width => 90,
  :height => 60,
})

The resulting encoding will have all the thumbnails listed inside the files attribute

Complete settings

You can set numerous of options to make your encoding just right.

Panda::Profile.create!({
  # h264 profile
  :preset_name => "h264",

  # sets your profile name to h264
  :name => "h264",

  # 2 pass encoding
  :two_pass => true,

  # 30 fps
  :fps => 30,

  # mp4 format and .mp4 extname
  :extname => ".mp4"

  # 48k sample rate
  :audio_sample_rate => 48000,

  # Resolution 1080x720
  :height => 720,
  :width => 1080,

  # set the s3 destination
  :path_format => "my/path/:id",

  # don't upscale the video if the input is smaller than your profile resolution
  :upscale => false,

  # starts the clip after 10 seconds
  :clip_offset => "00:00:10",

  # Cut the clip after 20 minutes
  :clip_length => "00:20:00",

  # Keep aspect ratio
  :aspect_mode => 'letterbox',

  # Bitrates
  :video_bitrate => 2200,
  :audio_bitrate => 128,
})