With just a little input on your part, the calculator will provide you with a video bitrate to use. Before you get started, there are a couple of things to keep in mind:
- Quality definitely differs between low, medium and high but low isn't going to make your video look like crap either. All your options are designed to be watch-able, but the bigger the screen the higher you'll want to set the quality. When in doubt, Medium is always a good choice.
- If you're just encoding for your computer, just go for it. If you're encoding for your mobile device, be sure to check its encoding specifications (for example, here are specs for the iPhone). While this calculator aims to stay within the bounds of mobile devices (at least at the "Low" quality setting), it's possible it may exceed your device's capabilities. It's always best to double-check before putting in the time to encode a long movie.
- The reason this calculator only handles video is because audio bitrate is going to be restricted by your device. For example, Apple devices should always encode stereo audio at 160kbps. A sampling rate of 48Khz is what you're going to want to use in almost every case. If you don't have any device restrictions, we recommend 256kbps for stereo audio. Feel free to choose whatever you'd like, but as a reference point you should know that most of the music you buy online is encoded at 192kbps.
Okay, that's all, have fun!
