Transcoding

Transcoding is the direct analog-to-analog or digital-to-digital conversion of one encoding to another, such as for movie data files (e.g., PAL, SECAM, NTSC), audio files (e.g., MP3, WAV), or character encoding (e.g., UTF-8, ISO/IEC 8859). This is usually done in cases where a target device (or workflow) does not support the format or has limited storage capacity that mandates a reduced file size, or to convert incompatible or obsolete data to a better-supported or modern format.