H.264 Video Bitrate - How Low Can You Go? 

If anyone is interested in seeing the original rendered file (not the aggressive RU-vid recompressed file), you can download it here - bit.ly/2T5IQkQ (500MB)

I watched this on my iPhone 6 plus yesterday and was shocked to see no really significant difference until CBR 500 kbps. I've just re-watched on my 27" monitor and there was no terribly significant difference until CBS 800 kbps at "Auto 1080 HD" on the RU-vid player - your shirt started getting artefacts over it at that quality. Extremely surprising that it was "good enough" for a piece to camera for RU-vid at that bitrate - though it was quite sharp, your eyes were always in perfect focus & your audio was perfect. Interesting experiment Torsten !

256kbps is basically Skype quality

Thanks for keeping the video nice and simple getting to the point quick, I'm tired of going through multiple videos just to see what you showed here in under 10 minutes.

From 3 MBPS your T shirt started softening, Good Video to understand bitrate

This was extremely helpful. I was having trouble with some of my edited videos ending up with file sizes larger than the original footage. Turnes out the bitrate was set at 40. Glad to learn that I could drop it quite a bit without worrying about the details

15to8 lost the tiniest clarity, still excellent. 5 showed first softness on stubble. 2 looked casually fine. 1 shockingly 'okay.' 500k looked same as common youtubers at full, 'normal.' Real lesson here is how important clear audio is. Don't be afraid of mono in a pinch. So many on phones anyhow.

Man, you simplified and explained the whole bitrate thing wonderfully! thank you @TDCatTech

Thanks much for doing this. Saved me a lot of headache, and definitely lot of bandwidth. Cheers mate.

Looks like people are overdoing the bitrates massively. Great test with valuable information for me, thank you for this 👍🏻🍻

This is very helpful and I recently sent it to a client having a hard time with this concept. Subbed and thumbed thank you.

Wow! 256 used to be many of my original videos 15 years ago. We just accepted it back then as the default.

Thanks so much, helpful and informative! Have you considered doing something like this for higher-motion shots? I'd love to see the results (especially because I do a fair bit of drone work). Thanks again!

Thanks for this test! So, if I render at target bitrate 16 or up, will that end up being worse compressed than a 15? (which I hear is what youtube compresses videos down to)

Not a huge difference until you get to 3Mbps.

Thank you. It was very useful. Surprised to see not a lot of difference untill 500k.

Extremely helpful video. Thank you. On my Dell Inspiron at 1600x900 resolution I couldn't notice any real difference until 256k. (I'm watching this as I wait for a 45 minute video to encode at 5 MBPS and now realizing I could probably cut the time and file size by 5.)

Lol thanks for sharing, informative and good for a chuckle. I couldn't tell til you got into the kilobytes 👍

Thanks for the vid! Very revealing! I never wanted to do anything under 8-10mbps, but I hardly so any change down to 1!!!

Love how I could barely tell a difference up until like 3 mbps because of how little movement there was, but also RU-vid 1080p30 only requires about 4 mbps bandwidth. It's actually insane how much 'video' you can still get with such little bandwidth and compression. Even my H264 TV stations require slightly less than 5 mbps and look pretty decent if there's not too much detail, the H265 channels look really good at 5 mbps. I would've been really curious to see how much it could've restored the image if he didn't move as much in the 256 kbps one, but I assume it's just not enough to get to HD levels. Really cool and interesting video!!!

Appreciate the video! Very helpful 🙌🏽

Great video! How did you edit it to have the various bitrates in the same video? Thanks @TDCatTech

hi thanks for this video. i have full hd video and encode video by adobe media encoder. on export setting i do high and 5.1 and cbr 3 but my video not good and i must change cbr to 8. please tell me what i do , media encoder good for encode ?

I like the test, thank you for the effort, i have a question though but in terms of streaming gaming content, does higher bitrate also require higher PC specs or it just needs high mbps and the quality will improve but with the same PC specs? Thank you.

This is sooo helpful. Really great. Thank you. Let me ask you something. Let's say I'm fine with 2mbps on your example. Does that translate to 8mbps on a 4k file?

Very helpful! Thanks for putting this together. I'll be dropping my bitrate to 8 for now. Maybe more later but I really couldn't see a difference from 15 to 8. Actually, it wasn't obvious until much lower. I didn't do a detail study but i'm going to go with 8 to be safe and that would save me some space without really any negative. I guess if i'm going for more artistic or more dynamic range I might keep those videos higher but for most, i think i'm going to drop them to 8 for a bit and test this out. Thanks again!

I was able to noticed a bit of a difference at 3000Mbps down to the 256Kbps but I was watching from an LG OLED C9. 5000Mbps still looked pretty good. Thank you very much for doing this test.

Thanks so much!! Very helpful saved me a lot of time :)

who would have thought 1mbps looks pretty good...cheers for the video 😀

Quite a handy display of bit rate effect on video quality, very nice

This is pretty useful for pros, those who are not pros can hardly see the difference, but I see every difference, thank you a lot bro. Now I think 3mb is the lowest golden line if you want a good quanlity video and perfect file size at the same time.

Just wondering how were you able to encoding in different bitrate and then put them in the same video. Did you make the separate videos then make a totally new sequence import them, then make the constant bitrate higher?

Great video. Thank you. I always watch YouTue in 480p. The quality with 500 kbps was fine; but 256 kbps was terrible. I rewatched it in full screen HD and found the quality good down to 800 kbps; but 500kbps started to break up. The bitrate is not a problem. The problem is that your hair is out of the frame. Many will focus on that and not really care about what you are saying or the bitrate - as long as it is 800 kbps or above. I learned a lot from this. I am planning to get a camera for video and I may save thousand dollars because of your video. It seems that 10 Mbps and 20 Mbps is much more than I will ever need. Thank you again!

this really helped me understand bitrates. thanks.

And oh yea, 2 tips for those who can't see the difference: keep staring at the ege of his right ear and hair above right ear, and his face when he is moving.

thanks for doing this. Great video ...really helped

Thanks! This was super helpful!

Interesting experiment. For me a change was noticed on the last two settings. Margin note: Software and graphic cards will adapt and respond differently as they process the data. Liked.

Thanks for this! really informative and useful

What is the good bitrate for video so that Whatsapp won't loose its quality, I've seen some status video which looks in high quality, can anyone brief me out what settings to use, I'll be very much thankful

This was so useful and to the point!

Wow.. only after you downsized to 250 Kbps I could notice a drop in video and not audio quality. You have explained well. I'm currently exporting at 17Mbps bit rate on RU-vid Channel what's your advice? Shall I stick with it? Or go down to 5 or 10 ? ..... RP videos

If im setting up a ptz camera over a 4g sim network what is the recommended bit rate setting i should be using and how would that translate to the amount of data im using?

Thanks for the video!

great way to understand how much bitrate you need. Read somewhere that it is also depending on the recording device’s bitrate, is it?

Very good video. Very realistic. Thank You so much for this tutorial

Thanks for this video, I am struggling with loading up my videos to you tube from my canon g7x mk 2 as they end up blurry on you tube. I use resolve to edit. any advice?

Good vid. Couldn't notice any difference until you went to 1mpbs. Then a bit of smudginess but not so noticeable until below 800kbps. But it's important to emphasize very strongly here that there is almost no movement in the video other than your mouth/jaw and hands. Try this test while walking around outside and you'll see a huge difference at much higher bitrates. I do travel vlogging type stuff and have to limit my bitrate in Davinci Resolve at 20mpbs because anything lower than that seems to result in a noticeable amount of shearing and smudginess/bluriness. But this was good info for me to use on my other channel where the background is static and I'm not moving around much. For that one I'll try going down to about 3mpbs and see if it makes a difference.

Thanks, definitely useful!

Hi, how many frames per seconddid you use for the tested bitrates?

4:43, in answer to your question about to what level RU-vid dumps bitrate: RU-vid is compressing your HD upload file (this video) to 1267kbps for .mp4. The same file is then 1867kbps for .mkv. I used 4K Video Downloader.

It would be cool to see in a live stream thru zoom how bitrates affect quality...and how different resolutions affect quality.

How to you change mbps whan, before or in export?

Hi. I agree with most comments down there. Opening the RU-vid's URL on VLC, I didn't notice any difference until the 800Kbps kicked in. My VLC settings are in FullHD first, due the limitations of my device. Tested in a HP Stream 14, Manjaro XFCE.

I suggest you make some follow-on videos doing the same comparison but with different types of video. For instance, I'd be very interested to see how these bit rates work for the kind of videos I'm making, which mostly a computer screen (where it's important to be able to see the small text) with a talking head in the corner.

Thanks for a freaking great video. I could definitely notice the difference at 2mbps. U hair lost detail when u moved ur head. I was watching this on an ipad

Great video!! I've actually been compressing all my footage down to 10Mbps for many years now and I was starting to wonder if maybe that was too low. Definitely not!

Very interesting experiment. I never dreamed you could get that low with such little degradation. Don't think Mr. Spielberg will need to watch this, but for the rest of us, putting up Mickey Mouse You Tube video's it's comforting to know that we can get away with a slightly lower bitrate than we might have originally considered. Thank you much!

Great video and experiment. Thanks for sharing.

@TDCatTech Can you make the same video with AV1 ?

3:43 with CBR I've noticed that your hand moves less fluid than with VBR. Yes, my eyes are very demanding. But thanks very much for the video. +1 sub. This video is from 2019 and I am writing in 2022. So, there is some video of yours that shows these differences with higher bitrates for 1080p?

Is it ok to use 51 mbps for 1440p gameplay videos exported with premier? Is it bad for my quality if i use higher bitrate or it only increases the size of the file?

I noticed that small text in combination with a lot of movement gets distorted the first at lower bitrates.

does the recording app let u choose below 256 ? what would happen at 1kbps? i wondering if 0 kbps would record nothing at all.

I was trying to compress some lecture videos which don't have much movement at all. And they usually only have a very simple audio stream that contains only one human voice. So, I think this video was more helpful for me this way. I think that you should have tried also lowering the bitrate of your audio stream. I was experimenting with compressing audio streams down to 32 kbps with the Fraunhofer FDK AAC HE V2 codec, (all done in a program called Xmedia recode). And the audio stream does bring down the file size considerably and it doesnt affect the quality much at all if it is only a person speaking.

Great video!

My cctv channels are up to 1561 kB/s it was originally from 500 then I rebooted but I hit it twice and it came back with the big numbers I don't have a clue what do to put it back how do I do it

Thank you !

I keep getting "FileNotFoundError: No such file: '/content/gdrive/My Drive/first-order-motion-model/02.png'". I know it stands "02.png" but that is because I made a picture that was named that. I also named the map and did everything I should but the error still comes. I have checked that it is a png file and not jpg or any other. Please help me.

I think 10mbps until 5mbps is ok... if you are in tripod and camera is stationary but anything below 20mbps is bad especially if the camera is not stationary and there is constant movement the jittering or artifacts would be very obvious. Some videographer would also jack up the data bitrate as much as possible for some reasons like cropping or framing, resizing etc, imagine trying to crop with an aspect ratio of 16:9 an 8mbps video jittering and artifacts would ruin the video. So the rule is you can go low if your planning to do video with tripod and no cropping considered and high if you are planning for cropping, zooming and camera movements hope this helps.

🏆Very useful. Thank you!

honestly bro you could get away with 1mbps. I didn't notice a huge drop off until that point really. great test. thanks! (he remarked 5 years later) update: just downloaded the uncompressed link and watched it on my MacBook pro screen and 3mbps was still quite good imho

under 2000 bitrate things start to feel pixelated when you move your hands !

but the upper part of the background (the other room) is even bad quality with high bitrates. often i see such bad quality in the darker regions in the background. is it possible that modern codecs use lower bitrates on darker spaces in the background?

actually got pretty low before i even noticed anything interesting!

22" FHD display shows slight softening at 2Mbps when you moved your hands but at 1Mbps, the quality drop is very clear in full-screen but still good in window mode. Obviously this whole thing would change if he'd be shooting with a busy background.

Interesting. Thank you.

What about for fast motion video and gaming?

How to convert 24/25 fps videos into 60 fps and make it smooth (Frame interpolation), which pc software gives good results in this?

Watching your video on 360p and I see difference on 256kbps but the 500kbps still look the same with bit laggy like 15fps..... and I try using my phone record some video with different bitrates 1st video recorded 1mbps 24fps for 10 seconds file size 1mb, the 2nd video 24fps 99mbps for 10 seconds file size 100+ mb. And it's dark so it less data what if I record outdoor? That's a lot of data. What I see the playback on my phone almost similar but I think if you watch it on larger screen the video with less bitrates will become unwatchable, and if I edit the video I will export it on 10mbps because if I export it on 29mbps the 100mb file will become 500mb I don't know why it become larger if the original video are less than 200mb file

Thanks for doing this. Althought it is quite misleading IMO since the image you are presenting is almost completely still with not a lot of sharp details. I mean 70% of the image is out of focus & just plain white. Since MP4 uses temporal compression, result is a very good image no matter what is the bitrat,e in that particular scenario. If there was the slighest action in your scene; vegetation, movement, or even sharp image patterns, it would come out quite trash at 8 kbps and below.

lol its like he is not evening changing anything... they all looked same. Great video. Thanks for the lesson on bitrates.

I would say if you only do like sit down & head move video, there wouldn't be much difference. But if you go out and shoot outdoor video, much difference can be seen between high bitrate & low bitrate.

Good test. But would cool if there ultra test with x264, x265, x265 10 bit, vp9 (maybe av1 but its not optimized yet) with differient presets and fast, normal and maximum compress settings with 2 pass encode. Because when you put x264 in search on youtube there only videos about streaming, sad

can u do 8t by puttig lightinn front abnd giving side by side maybe better

Video quality depends on what you are converting, try to get good quality from DayZ, for example, there is a lot of detail and a lot of grass, the video you convert and send later is significantly different from what you can do on your computer for several hours and send after conversion.

On my pixel 3xl, didn't see a difference until you hit 256kbs. Crazy! I will repeat on my viewsonic monitor at home. UPDATE: Saw this at home and it looks like you start seeing your mustache softening up at 3Mbs and below. Nothing else really changes until you get down to 500kbs.

People like you are great

With 20mpbs and a 60fps Rocket League gaming video, nearly the entire Screen gets pixelated/mushed.

Can anyone tell why my Android phone footage turns out garbage after uploading on RU-vid ? I've been using upto 45Mbps in hope of solving this issue but no luck yet

Amazing how well low bit rates hold up on the iPhone 6s Plus. I’ll watch again once I’m at my computer. Thanks for the test 🙂

Thanks for your video. But I would have expected a comparison between 100mbit, 70mbit,50mbit and then some lower bitrates...

Excellent video. Thanks. ROKU secret menu to reduce bit rate. Press Home 5 times, rew 3 times, ff 2 times. (I don't know why Roku makes this a secret menu. It's very useful.) According to what I saw on his video I think a 1mbps setting on my Roku is going to be sufficient for me. The biggest TV I have is 42 inch. My internet has a top speed of about 6mbps. You may think that's primitive. But I live on an island in south Florida. I can see manatees and dolphins everyday from my backyard. When I get tired of that I jump in the pool. You on the other hand have a very fast internet speed :)

I could see no big difference down to 500 kbps... then the difference to 256 kbps was shocking... the resolution, the color depth and the framerate got reduced considerably. It's actually hard to believe that THIS reduction in quality only results in half the bitrate... in my eyes the bitrate difference should be much bigger there.

800kbps looked totally fine to me. I am surprised and I love it.

Just watched this. Looking closely, the first place the quality starts falling apart is in the texture on his sweater- in the shadows it starts getting "blocky" at 4 mbps- but you really have to look hard.

A question occurred to me and it's burning a whole in my brain. Just why the HECK do cameras typically come with no choice of bitrates? (other then 'best') Obviously a few choices there would be great, for many reasons. Also because you could record 4k to slower cards. I 'hope' there's a technical reason, not some weird sociological one. I mean it seems like we would be screaming for this. What's going on here? What, did we 'forget to ask for it'? Might seem like and odd question, idk, but really, I find it a very odd situation.

usefull!!! thanks no really diference until 256kps !!!

thanks man.. soo i think safe level for youtube is 5MB/s right? except we gonna reupload it again XD

congratulations to me. i just save 70 percent of the storage for the future videos.