What Is the Best Bitrate Setting for H.264 Encoding

H.264 might be the most popular codec used to encoding HD videos, for its high compression ratio. If you have the plan to encode or re-encode video into H.264 with, like say freeware HandBrake, one thing that you better pay close attention to is the bit rate settings, which, to some extent, decides your video visual quality. So what is an appropriate bitrate setting for H.264 encoding? Is it different when applying to videos in different resolutions? See the answers below.

What Is Video Bitrate?

Video bitrate is the number of bits per second output from video data (video color quantity, brightness measurement, pixel quantity), and the usual unit of video bitrate is kbps.

The Necessity of Setting Appropriates Video Bitrate

In the application of video conference, the quality of video and the network bandwidth occupation are contradictory. Normally, the video streaming occupying more bandwidth gets higher quality. Therefore, the high quality of video requires high network bandwidth. The way to solve the contradiction is video coding technology. To judge the advantages and disadvantages of a video coding-decoding technology, on one hand, we can compare which video's quality is better based on the same network; on the other hand, we can compare which video occupies less room on the basis of the same quality.

However, do videos with higher bitrate get high quality? In theory, it's true. Yet in the range of visual resolution, when the bit rate is high enough, it doesn't seem to make a difference. Therefore, the bitrate does have its optimal value. In the documentation of h.264 (also known as AVC or x.264), the recommended bitrate of H.264 video is as follows:

Suggested bitrates for different video resolutions with H.264 Encoding

Suggested bitrate settings for mobile phones with different resolution