Multiple Bit Rate's

I was going through my Sorenson presets and looked at the Multiple Bit Rate file option for windows media.

Could anyone tell me if I am getting this right - that I could make a Multiple Bit Rate video file for modem users and broadband users and just serve the one file to them and dependent on their net connection they are served the appropriate file ?

thanku, socks

Honestly dont know, ill give you a bump though as one of the movie guys may know :)

Regards,

Lee

Cheers Lee, be good if it did work that way ;-)


socks

I would advise against doing multiple bit rate encoding. It is not always reliable, more errors when serving versus a single bit rate file. We have found problems when it tries to shift back and forth between various rates as throughput changes. Better to serve each stream individually and let the user chose his own rate.

It also makes for HUGE file sizes as the bitrate versions are all bundled into one. So you may end up serving up the entire file size even if you are only streaming the 56Kbps stream rate.

Just overall prone to more issues.

Also, I believe that the multiple bitrate streaming works correctly (well, as correctly as *any* Micro$oft product works) only if you're using Windows Media Streaming Server. If you're serving it from a Linux box, I don't think it streams at all, just downloads.

Thanks for the advise guys, I'll keep away from MBR :-)

socks