What is bitrate?
You will surely have heard the word bitrate on many occasions when an expert talks about digital format videos. But, if you don’t know what bitrate is or what it is, we tell you in this article so that from now on you will be clear about what is being talked about when bitrate is mentioned.
Like the resolution and the final format of the digital video, another of the determining factors to obtain an excellent image quality is bitrate. Specifically, bitrate is the flow or data rate, that is, the amount of information when playing a video that reads our computer per second.
By resolution we mean the size, that is, the amount of information you have for each centimeter or for every inch (although they are not really technically measured in centimeters or inches, but we explain it this way to be clear). That is why a low quality video looks pixelated if we enlarge them, it is because it lacks information, it lacks greater quality of details.
For that reason, and in the same way that happens with the size of the image, the greater the data flow, the greater the quality of the material.
The bitrate can be even more decisive than the size of the image to define its quality. The reason? Although we have a large video, if the data flow is poor, the material will be of poor quality.
For example, a VCD of 352×288 resolution and 1150 kbits / s will be of higher quality than one of 720×576 and 300 kbits / s.
In this same example, if one of them has a larger screen size, its bandwidth is low, since this data stores the information related to the luminaire and the color of the video.
For that reason, when the data flow is poor, the computer must group a large number of pixels that contain the same information, generating a redundancy that affects the quality of the video.
Because, although the video is large, the computer only gets few data with which to “fill in” that large space. It has little detail again, because it has little information for the space it should detail.
Bitrate implies the amount of details or data that flows through each period of time. The more data we have, the more detail can be obtained and in greater detail, we will obtain a higher quality.
The equation is that simple: quality depends on detail. Just as in a camera the number of megapixels matters, in the same way a higher bitrate will give us more details per second and that will directly impact the quality of the video.
