I wouldn't spend real effort keeping transcoding out of a pipeline. One codec end-to-end for all audiences is not the normal state of affairs but a convenient a

I wouldn't spend real effort keeping transcoding out of a pipeline. One codec end-to-end for all audiences is not the normal state of affairs but a convenient aberration. Sooner or later (I doubt it'll be more than a couple of years) somebody's going to achieve 95% of the quality with 50% of the power budget, or fully capitalize on the redundancy of 3D footage, or something like that.