How much bitrate does a video actually need
Bitrate decides how good a video looks and how much it costs to store. Here is what each step up buys you, measured on a real clip.
Bitrate in one sentence
Bitrate is how much data each second of video is allowed to use, and it decides both how good the picture looks and how much the video costs you to keep.
The honest answer to how much you need
It depends on what is moving. A person talking in front of a plain wall compresses down to almost nothing. Wind in trees, confetti, rain, film grain and fast handheld camera work do not. Two files at the same resolution and the same bitrate can look completely different.
As a starting point, on our own ladder: 1080p targets about 4.5 Mbps, 720p about 2 Mbps, 480p about 1.1 Mbps and 4K about 16 Mbps. Those are targets, not floors. Easy footage lands well under them.
Where the extra megabits stop helping
Somewhere between 4 and 8 Mbps at 1080p, for most content, the improvement becomes something you have to look for rather than something you notice. Past that you are paying storage for a difference your viewers will not see.
We put four encodes of one clip side by side so you can find that point yourself rather than take our word for it. It is on the bitrate comparison page.
Why we do not ask you to pick
Because the right number is different for every viewer and changes while they watch. Every upload gets seven bitrates and the player picks between them, second by second. You upload the file. That is the whole job.
See it working. Tears of Steel by Blender Foundation, CC BY 3.0, streaming from here right now. Open the quality menu and watch it switch. More about this file.
Keep reading
- What adaptive streaming actually does
- Adaptive streaming means one upload becomes several versions and the player picks between them while it plays. Here is what that looks like in practice, with a video you can watch.
- Video resolutions explained, 240p to 4K
- What 720p, 1080p, 1440p and 4K mean in pixels, which screens need which, and how much storage each one costs you.
- Bitrate comparison
- One clip at 1, 2, 4 and 8 Mbps, side by side.
- Free test videos
- Five open licence films you can stream, embed and redistribute.