STREAMING & ENCODING

Video Bitrate Calculator

Choose the right video bitrate for streaming or recording by matching resolution, frame rate, and quality to the bandwidth you actually have available.

Use it when you need a practical bitrate target for OBS Studio, YouTube, Twitch, RTMP contribution, or production recording workflows without guessing.

If you are building around OBS specifically, start with the practical OBS Studio page and then use this calculator for the numbers.

Estimate: Video Bitrate 8.5 Mbps
Estimate: With AAC 320 kbps 8.8 Mbps
Planning Bandwidth (+20%) 10.6 Mbps upload
Estimate: Storage per Hour 3.8 GB/hr
Estimate: Storage per Day (8hr) 30.1 GB
Estimate: Required Network Bandwidth 10.6 Mbps

Real-World Use Cases

Twitch & YouTube (OBS)

Compare a planning bitrate with your sustained upload capacity, then confirm the current ingest requirements published by the destination service.

Live Broadcast Contribution

Calculate the required upload speed for a CDN contribution stream from an OB van using SRT over cellular bonding.

Recording Profiles

Estimate recording bitrate targets when you need a cleaner master than your live stream but still need practical bandwidth and storage expectations.

Related Guides & Next Step

Use these when bitrate is only one part of the decision and you need clearer context before locking in values.

Understand video codecs first Plan OBS streaming settings Fix OBS dropped frames
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Use it for every streaming spec, encoding brief, or storage capacity plan.

What is the Video Bitrate Calculator?

Estimates data throughput for compressed streaming, selected production formats, and uncompressed ST 2110-20 payload planning.

The result is a starting point. Encoder behaviour, scene complexity, codec profile, chroma sampling, ancillary flows, packetisation, and link policy can materially change the real requirement.

Real-World Use Cases

Essential for calculating uplink bandwidth for SRT or RTMP streams, estimating archive storage requirements for newsrooms, or designing the backbone of an IP-based production studio.

Use the output to prepare a test profile, then verify it with encoder telemetry, a representative scene, and the destination or storage specification.

Technical Methodology

Compressed formats use visible planning coefficients. ProRes and NDI use published target or typical reference rates scaled by pixel rate. ST 2110 uses active-image sample payload plus a disclosed 10% planning allowance.

The 20% network allowance is a user-facing planning reserve, not a protocol guarantee. Add audio, ancillary streams, redundancy, and the actual switch or uplink policy separately where applicable.

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