# Introduction

Media Server can encode the video it ingests and write the video to files, to a stream, or to a rolling buffer.

There are several reasons for encoding video:

- If you are ingesting video from a stream, you can encode the video for playback at a later time. If your analysis tasks detect interesting events in the video, you might want to review those events.
- You can choose the size and bit rate of the encoded video. If you are analyzing sources such as high-definition television broadcasts, you might want to reduce the size and bit rate of the video for storage and streaming to users when they search for clips.

Encoding video does not affect the video frames used for analysis. Analysis always uses the source video.

Media Server provides several audio and video profiles that contain settings for encoding. For example, there are profiles for high-quality output, which you can use if you want to prioritize quality over disk space. By default, the files are stored in the `profiles` folder in the Media Server installation directory. You should not need to modify the profiles. When you configure encoding, you can select the profiles that you want to use.

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