Abstract: Systems and methods are described herein for adaptively transcoding media in a communications network such that computer processing resources are effectively utilized to deal with varying traffic patterns in the communications network. A computing device receives a request to transcode content and determines a first amount of tokens based on a number of CPU cores associated with the computing device, and a currently used amount of tokens. The computing device determines a second amount of tokens associated with transcoding the content and when the first amount of tokens is less than the second amount of tokens, the computing device bypasses transcoding for the content or adjusts a transcoding parameter to reduce a number of tokens associated with transcoding the content.