What is bitrate?
How much data a video or audio file uses per second of playback, usually measured in Mbps (video) or kbps (audio).
Bitrate is the single biggest lever on file size. At a fixed resolution and frame rate, doubling the bitrate roughly doubles the file size and - up to a point - visibly improves quality, because more data means less compression artifacting per frame.
Past a certain point, more bitrate stops helping: platforms re-encode everything you upload to their own target bitrate anyway, so a wildly over-bitrated source file mostly just makes the upload slower without changing what viewers eventually see.
Koldflux picks the right codec, container and bitrate for every platform automatically - this glossary exists because our own team had to get it right first.
Automate this in Koldflux