Home › Glossary › What is bitrate?
Bitrate is the amount of data your encoder produces each second, usually written in kilobits per second.
A bitrate your connection cannot sustain produces dropped frames, which look far worse than a lower, stable setting. Stability beats peak quality every time.
Fast motion at high resolution needs more data to stay sharp. The same bitrate that looks clean on a slow talk stream will smear on a fast game.
Each service publishes recommended and maximum values, and exceeding them can push you outside transcoding support, which hurts viewers on slower connections.
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