Which bitrate for video trailers?
 

Anyone recommend which bitrate to use for encoding video trailers for a paysite, I'm thinking most surfers may just click the link so windows media player will just stream it, so in that case I'm thinking 500k/s total, but I've seen some other sites using 300k/s. I'd love to be able to have them in 800k/s but I'm thinking some surfers may have trouble watching if they have a shit connection.

I think that still to this day, the larger portion of the population is on a slow, or slower connection. So I would go with 300 to 500. But there are others on here with more knowledge of it than I.

why not offer connection speed options, imo people should offer dvd quality as well as 56k. Besides production time it can't hurt and the broadband users will be sold instantly and the 56k users know they can download a video, go to sleep, and watch dvd quality the next morning or night. Sales will beat out bandwidth :2 cents: but I'm just YoungMoney. :)

That's a good idea but might be hard to implement, because on my frontpage I need to link the screenshots and "view the trailer" from each episode to the corresponding trailer. I think it may be best to have them all the same bitrate.

Just use php to pass a quality variable. As far as production issues, you will always get out what you put in.

I usually encode them about 700 Kb. Not really small, but less than that and the quality looks kinda crappy imho. Most people are on broadband now anyway.

Actually I'm thinking of offering 3 different versions based on your suggestions.

But your strong overtones regarding my production values have left a lot to be desired. Overall I'd say I'm quite jolly.

a lot is going to depend on what program you are using to encode:

http://www.gofuckyourself.com/showthread.php?t=485835

Thanks for the link, I'm using Adobe Premiere to output using Adobe Media Encoder, then I'm using VideoCharge to convert to the various quality versions I will use.

I suggest Sorenson Squeeze 4 or Cleaner for encoding.

Thank's for your help YoungMoney, I'm going to offer 300, 500, 828 k/s versions of the trailers.

http://desirespace.com/filez/rizla.jpg

why not 1.04 Mbps at 640x480 thats what bangbros has them at, and they convert well

1100kb/s
900kb/s
700kb/s