What is bitrate?
Definition
Bitrate is the amount of data a video uses per second, usually measured in megabits per second (Mbps).
Bitrate decides both quality and file size. Size is bitrate times duration: 8 Mbps is about 60 megabytes a minute. Too low a bitrate shows as smeared text and blocky movement, because the encoder had to throw detail away.
Screens that barely change need little data. Scrolling, animation and video inside the recording need much more.
In Sceed
Sceed’s export has three quality tiers and shows megabits a second and megabytes a minute before you start.
Related terms
- Resolution
- Resolution is the number of pixels in each frame of a video, written as width × height, for example 1920 × 1080.
- H.264
- H.264 is the most widely supported video codec: nearly every browser, phone, computer and video site can play it.
- Hardware encoding
- Hardware encoding compresses video using a dedicated encoder chip in the graphics card instead of the main processor.
- Frame rate
- Frame rate is the number of still pictures a video shows each second, measured in frames per second (fps).