
Bit rate as a characteristic of digital video and audio
Concept

Bitrate: literally, the information bit rate. 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 symbols start and stop 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 stream of data (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 amount of data stream transmitted in real time (the minimum channel size that this stream can pass through 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 bitrate (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 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 audio CDs, information is losslessly encoded at a constant 1407 kbps bit rate.
The MP3 format allows encoding audio information with constant or variable bitrate from 32 to 320 kbps, that is, they provide five times the compression compared to CD.








