The same clip at
four different bitrates.
Bitrate is the dial that decides both how good a video looks and how much it costs you to store. Everyone quotes numbers. Here are four encodes of one clip, from the same master, so you can decide for yourself where the line is.
1 Mbps · 3.1 MB
Blocking in the dark areas, edges smear when the camera moves. Fine for a phone on a weak signal, not for a laptop.
2 Mbps · 6.3 MB
Watchable on a phone or tablet. Fast motion still softens, but nothing falls apart.
4 Mbps · 12.6 MB
Where most 1080p streaming sits. Hard to fault on anything smaller than a television.
8 Mbps · 25.4 MB
Twice the file for a difference you have to look for. This is the point of diminishing returns.
What the numbers actually mean
Bitrate is how many bits of data a second of video is allowed to use. At 4 Mbps, one second of your film costs about half a megabyte. An hour costs about 1.8 GB. That is the whole trade: picture quality on one side, storage and bandwidth on the other.
The thing nobody tells you is that the relationship is not a straight line. Going from 1 to 2 Mbps is a dramatic improvement. Going from 4 to 8 doubles the file and most people cannot tell the difference on a laptop. The curve flattens, and where it flattens depends on what is in the frame.
Why one number never fits every viewer
A talking head against a plain wall and a handheld shot of a forest in wind need completely different bitrates to look the same. Slow, flat footage compresses beautifully. Motion, grain, foliage and confetti do not.
This is why we do not ask you to pick a number. Every upload is encoded at seven different bitrates at once, and the player chooses between them while it plays. Someone on fibre gets the top one, someone on a train gets a lower one, and the same video serves both without you doing anything.
Rough numbers to plan storage with
- 240p, about 0.4 Mbps, roughly 0.2 GB an hour
- 480p, about 1.2 Mbps, roughly 0.5 GB an hour
- 720p, about 2.1 Mbps, roughly 1 GB an hour
- 1080p, about 4.6 Mbps, roughly 2 GB an hour
- 4K, about 16 Mbps, roughly 7 GB an hour
Those are the numbers our own encoder targets. A full ladder, every quality together, works out around 3.6 GB per hour of 1080p source, measured across 551 hours of real customer video.
Try it on your own footage
The clips above come from Tears of Steel, which you are free to download and run through your own encoder. If you would rather not run one, upload a file here and look at the result. There is a free account and one flat price after that.