changing bitrate

[u53r_n4m3]

sorry for this complete noob question:

what would the effects be if i lowered the vido and audio bitrate of a movie?

how do i know what the bitrate is supposed to be?

[mill48]

Lowering the audio and video bitrates typically results in lower quality.

Search for "bitrate calculator" to determine the 'correct' bitrate for your video.

[u53r_n4m3]

so if i lowered my video bitrate, the quality would decrease but it will still play fine?

[lordsmurf]

so if i lowered my video bitrate, the quality would decrease but it will still play fine?

Not necessarily. You can go too low.

[redwudz]

Yes, it should still play. It may look like video from a surveillance camera if you get down too low. It will have a lot of macroblocking. Why not make up a ten second clip and try different settings?

Fast motion scenes will be the most affected, as they take higher bitrates for decent quality. If you have a low motion scene, it can go very low and still be watchable. If you are thinking of DVD's you can also go to 1/2 D1 or VCD resolutions and lower the bitrate even more. ('What is DVD' to the left has the list of compatible DVD resolutions. <<<)

Audio bitrate decreases have less of an effect. But you should stick with standard settings for compatibility. If the audio source is poor a higher bitrate won't help, but going too low would make the audio sound like bad telephone audio. A decrease in audio bitrate won't get you a lot more room on your disc, if you are trying to save space, compared to video bitrate reduction. For audio, use AC3 encoding for smaller files. Or with AVI, you can use MP3 as it's very compact.

[u53r_n4m3]

would a video bitrate of 500 kb/s be all right for an anime?

cause i tried making 30 sec samples of different video bitrates ranging from 5 to 5000. i saw the difference between 5000 and 500, but can't really tell the difference between the 500 and the 1000. they both look alright on my pc, but would they look just fine on the tv?


audio is at 96 since it isn't that high and the source bitrate is also 96.

[johns0]

The easiest thing to do is encode at 500kbps and then watch it and if you are happy enough with it then fine.