bitrate and transfer rate whats the difference?

[floopy]

When capturing what is the difference between bitrate and transfer rate i think one is causing block noise and one a blurred picture but until i understand what they do im beating my head against the wall

[Darkbird]

Bit rate is how much data your encoding/capturing is producing.

Transfer rate is how much data your hard disk drive can read or write. That is not the speed of the IDE interface. You may have ultra dma 66 hard drive, but the drive itself may only be able to transfer data at something like 20MB per second. Use a benchmarking tool to find out. VirtualDub also has a disk profiler utility that can show what your disk system is capable of.

As long as your bit rate doesn't exceed about two thirds of your transfer rate, you should be ok. Don't forget that transfer rate is usually in bytes per second, multiply by eight to get bits per second.