We're happy to announce that Android's popular video compression and transcoding project, @natario1/Transcoder, has been migrated to the DeepMedia organization. As a result, a fresh release with tons of fixes is already available for you to try:
kotlindependencies {
api("io.deepmedia.community:transcoder-android:0.11.0")
// Or with the old coordinates: api("com.otaliastudios:transcoder:0.11.0")
}
The project now has a new home for documentation at DeepMedia's Open Source Hub and it has received a shiny new logo to mark the occasion. Keep reading to learn about Transcoder's history and future under our company's endorsement!
About Transcoder
I personally started working on the open-source Transcoder library in late 2018. The library was born as a fork of @ypresto/android-transcoder, a similar tool which provided the structure for the whole transcoding pipeline, some of which still stands to this day. I had two simple goals:
- Provide hardware-accelerated MP4 compression on Android.
- Be available for everyone with a friendly open-source license, without FFmpeg's GPL concerns.
Over the years, the project received extremely positive feedback from the community and evolved into a more comprehensive tool for transcoding. It grew to support advanced features like video and audio concatenation, clipping, cropping, time interpolation (for example, to increase speed), audio resampling and thumbnail extraction.
Around the same time, Transcoder was endorsed and supported by ShareChat, who trusted it to provide performant and reliable video compression to their 350 million monthly active users. Soon after, my own time became very limited and I couldn't properly maintain the project for a long time.
Bringing Transcoder back
Jumping to 2024, Transcoder remains a popular tool among Android developers, but the lack of consistent maintenance limited its growth and potential. Recognizing the value of the library for the community, we at DeepMedia have decided to step in and lead the development in the future, while keeping the same open-source license, in line with the company's open-source commitment.
In a few weeks, the vast majority of long-standing issues were fixed and there was room for performance improvements, too.
The latest release, named 0.11.0, contains many of the changes that developers have been requesting
over and over in the past years.
We are now dedicated to ensuring that Transcoder regains its former reliability while also envolving to meet the needs of modern Android developers. If you are interested, please star the project and subscribe for updates!
Contributing
Needless to say, we encourage everyone to get involved, whether it's by sharing new ideas, reporting issues, or submitting pull requests. Your feedback will help us prioritize features and improvements that matter most to the community.
DeepMedia Video Editing SDK
Those familiar with our suite of media SDK may notice some similarities between Transcoder and DeepMedia's Video Editing SDK, which is being worked on. There are important differences between the two:
- The video editing SDK is a multiplatform product that supports Android and iOS.
- The video editing SDK targets video editing apps and is expected to contain more advanced features.
- Transcoder will keep being shaped by the community needs and feedback.
In our vision, Transcoder will return to being your reliable compression companion for Android apps, with a wide range of features that cover most users' needs. For advanced editing scenarios in mobile apps, we suggest you keep an eye on the Video Editing SDK!