Flash Encoding (FLV): What are the prefered bitrates?
I inherited a project that is sending videos off to a remote encoder to encode into FLVs.
Today, I noticed that we are asking them to encode at 1024kbps To me, this seems extremely high.
What is everyone else using? What is YouTube using for "standard" vs. "high quality" versions?
Thank you in advance.
Answer
Typically somewhere between 400-600kbps is average for 'standard' quality video. Higher quality video is often 800-1200kbps, but for many people this is too high a bit rate to maintain, so you shouldn't really have something this high as your only rate unless you know your target audience will have fast connections.
It's also a good idea to offer a low bit-rate stream (somewhere around 250-300kbps) for people with really slow connections, although it's hard to get video to look good at this rate even with H.264, and if you're still using VP6 then don't bother because it will look awful.
If you're producing HD (720p) content then bit-rates start to look pretty good at around 2500kbps but this is out of the reach of many internet users. (Note that YouTube uses 1000kbps for what they call HD, but it really isn't, because the digital blocking is awful. They'd be better off using a lower resolution.)
We use 272kbps/544kbps/1088kbps for low/medium/high quality video respectively.