Digital Media Converter 4.01

Selecting Bit Rates

For files that will be streamed over a network, you must consider carefully what bit rates you should use. Under most circumstances you can add the bit rates of all of the streams in a file together to get a general idea of the available bandwidth required to stream the file. However, a certain amount of overhead is also required for each stream. This overhead is summarized in the following table:

You must also consider that the theoretical maximum bandwidth available over a network connection is not a practical target bit rate. The average available bandwidth for any given connection falls well short of the bandwidth capacity of the connection, because of network traffic and many other factors.