
Bit rate concept
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Concept
Bitrate: literally, the transmission rate of information bits. It is common to use the bit rate when measuring the effective information transmission rate through the channel, that is, the “payload” transmission rate (in addition to that, the channel can transmit service information, for example, start and stop symbols for asynchronous transmission or control symbols for redundant coding). The baud rate, which takes into account the total bandwidth of the channel, is measured in baud.
Bit rate is the number of units of information required to store (transmit) one second of a data stream (generally audio and video files). It is generally measured in ‘kbps’, kilobits per second.
The term bit rate is used in two basic meanings
: channel or device characteristic: the maximum number of bits that can be transmitted per unit of time.
– The size of the data stream transmitted in real time (the minimum size of the channel that can pass this stream without delay).
– A special case is the compressed video or audio bit rate.
Bit rate is expressed in bits per second (bit / s, bps), as well as values derived with the prefixes kilo-, mega-, etc.
The term bit rate (along with subjective quality criteria) is often used as a characteristic to evaluate the performance of lossy compression algorithms.
Bitrate characterizes both the density of the information package and its quality. For example, out of two MP3 files compressed with different bit rates, a file with a higher bit rate will have a higher sound quality (close to the original). At the same time, a file of a different format, with the same bit rate, can offer both better and worse sound quality.
On an audio CD, information is losslessly encoded at a constant 1407 kbps bit rate.
The MP3 format allows you to encode audio information with a constant or variable bit rate from 32 to 320 kbps, that is, they provide five times the compression compared to CD.
Bit rate as a characteristic of digital video and audio
In streaming video and audio formats (such as MPEG and MP3) that use lossy compression, the bit rate parameter expresses the degree of compression of the stream and thus determines the size of the channel for which it is compressed data transmission. Most of the time, the audio and video bit rate is measured in kilobits per second (kilobit per second in English – kbps), less often – in megabits per second (for video only).
There are three compression modes for data transmission:
– with a constant bit rate (constant bit rate in English – CBR)
– with a variable bit rate (variable bit rate in English – VBR)
– with an average bit rate (English Average Bit Rate – ABR)
Variable and average bit rate
The codec chooses the required bit rate based on the parameters (the level of the desired quality) and, during the encoded chunk, the bit rate may change. When compressing audio, the desired bit rate is determined based on the psychoacoustic model. ABR is a variation of VBR in which the codec is compressed to a specified average value.














