files. The most common operation in this application is the transcoding of MPEG-2 files to the MPEG-4 or H.264 format. Real-time transcoding in a many-to-many way (any input format to any output format) is becoming a necessity to provide true search capability for any multimedia content on any mobile device, with over 500 million videos on the web and a plethora of mobile devices. History Before the advent of semiconductors and integrated circuits, realtime resolution and frame rate transcoding between different analog video standards was achieved by a CRT/camera tube combination. The CRT part does not write onto a phosphor, but onto a thin, dielectric target; the camera part reads the deposited charge pattern at a different scan rate from the back side of this target. The setup could also be used as a genlock. See also Concepts Data conversion Data transformation Lossy data conversion Type conversion Video coding Comparison Comparison of DVD ripper software Comparison of video converters Citations General and cited references Federal Standard 1037C MIL-STD-188 List of Portable Multimedia Software P. A. A. Assuncao and M. Ghanbari, "A frequency-domain video transcoder for dynamic bit-rate reduction of MPEG-2 bit streams", in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, vol. 8, no. 8, pp. 953-967, Dec. 1998. Huifang Sun, Xuemin Chen, and Tihao Chiang, Digital Video Transcoding for Transmission and Storage, New York, CRC Press, 2005. External links IDC Report on Video Transcoding Five Steps for Building Transcoding into Your Workflow whitepaper Transcoding White Papers Film and video technology Video conversion software