Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital conversion of one encoding to another. This is usually done in cases where a target device 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. Transcoding is commonly a lossy process, introducing generation loss; however, transcoding can be lossless if the input is losslessly compressed and the output is losslessly compressed or uncompressed. The process of lossy to lossy conversion introduces varying degrees of generation loss. In other cases, the transcoding of lossy to lossless or uncompressed is technically a lossless conversion because no information is lost, however the process is irreversible and is more suitably known as destructive.
