Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with bitrate

How to reduce the filesize of iMovie exports.

Glum — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 10:51:57 -0800

What bit rate should I store (for general viewing) my iMovie videos at? I shoot home movies on a Flip Mino HD. I'm no Copolla (as the hardware would suggest) but I enjoy editing my movies together on iMovie, watching them back on my Mac and sharing with friends on YouTube.

The Flip Mino HD is 1280x720 so I export using the Share -> Export using QuickTime option in iMovie. I have been using H.264, with the resolution and frame set to match the source material. Importantly I left the Data Rate set to Automatic and the Compressor Quality set to best.

The results are good, but big. A less than 4 minute clip is resulting in a 681MB MOV file. Now I crunched it down in Handbrake so that I could upload it to YouTube more easily. I set it to restrict the file size to about 10% of the original size (70MB) which equates to a bit rate of something like 2380kbps. I would say there is very little difference in quality between this MP4 file and the original MOV.

I'm happy to save the massive MOVs to DVD or somewhere for archiving, but is there a rule I can use to determine what data rate to export at for general viewing?

How do I force Netflix to buffer?

razdrez — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 09:31:24 -0800

How do I choose a higher streaming rate when I'm using Netflix's "Watch Now" feature? Right now I'm using a 768 connection, and it's fine for everyday life, except that I can't watch netflix watch now movies in a decent quality. I don't mind waiting for my computer to buffer the entire thing before I watch it, but I can't find a way to choose the stream that I want. I've seen the greasemonkey script hack from rorta, but the forum says that this doesn't work anymore. (Also seen on lifehacker)

Are there any other options? I don't want to rip the movie or copy it to another computer, or even play it in another player (although I will do any of those if need be). All I want to do is just choose a higher bitrate.

Is there some kind of cookie variable I can change to start the download in high, and then press the pause button to let it buffer? I've tried looking in the source for the page, and downloading a stream manually in Windows Media Player, but although it downloaded a license, the movie never played.

Re-ripping audio CDs

apple scruff — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 12:04:58 -0800

Ripping tracks from a audio CD-R...what bitrate to use? I have a bunch of music CDs I burned in the past that I would like to rip back to my computer. My problem is that I don't know what bitrate they originally were in. All of them are at least 128, but that is all I know. Since I burned them as albums, every song on each CD should have the same bitrate, but each CD varies. Is there a simple way to find out? The reason I would like to know is because I'd like to re-rip the CDs at the highest bitrate possible without compromising the song quality. I also use Nero generally for these kinds of tasks, if you know how I could do it with that. Also, if there's something wrong with my line of reasoning please let me know, I am not too familiar with bitrate and quality in general.