why 2850 kbps video bitrate looks better than 3400 kbps?

[icefaii]

i always thought the higher the video bitrate the better. but how come in this link the bottom image 2850 kbps's color looks more vibrant? The top picture is 3400 kbps but the color looks more washed out?

http://imgur.com/a/hHtks

is the second image's quality better than the first?

[KarMa]

Bitrate should'nt have any bearing on color changes but instead mostly on detail retention. Certainly would never get that level of hue shift between encodings. Certainly something else caused this.

One of the encodings may of used bad decoder settings, which then passed on the image to the encoder. Or it was made "more vibrant" on purpose by the person encoding it. Assuming both encoding came from the same source, like a Bluray.

In the future I would suggest http://screenshotcomparison.com/ instead of imgur for comparing.

is the second image's quality better than the first?

If the goal is to be as close to the source as possible, then that an impossible task without a source image for comparison. One of them is obviously wrong. Looks like a BT.601 BT.709 problem, and the "more vibrant" one is wrong with its crushed blacks.

[icefaii]

oh you are right. I did not noticed the crushed black until you mentioned it. Could not see the details in the black sweater on the bottom picture. But i did not realized crushed black would make other colours look better though..

[Hoser Rob]

Generally, if a file with a lower bitrate looks better than one with a higher one, whoever did the former did a better job encoding. There is a hell of a lot more to it than just bit rate. I've seen video with a bit rate of >5mps that looked awful.

[hogger129]

What encoder was used? I could imagine something like 1080p or 720p content, encoded with x264 at 2850kbps, would look a lot better than an older encoder like MPEG-2 at 3400kbps.