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.