BITRATE VIDEO TRANSCODING BASED ON VIDEO CODING COMPLEXITY ESTIMATION

A system and method provides content-adaptive bitrate video transcoding of a source video for a video hosting service. The system is coupled to a video coding complexity engine and video rate-distortion modeling engine of the video hosting service. The system is configured to receive the video coding complexity score of the source video and a trained rate-distortion model and a scaling model. A target bitrate estimation module of the system is configured to calculate an initial target bitrate based on the video coding complexity using the trained rate-distortion model. A bitrate refinement module of the system is configured to adjust the initial target bitrate with respect to the resolution and/or frame rate of the transcoded source video. An adaptive video coder of the system is configured to transcode the source video with the adjusted target bitrate.