Compressing for streaming - Moderate speed broadband

Video compressed for moderate speed broadband (600 kbps) can look surprisingly good.
You can use 400kbps for video and 64-96kbps for audio. This permits 480x360 or 640x480 video that looks pretty good. Music sounds good.
Pauses and other streaming issues will be rare unless the line is shared among multiple users.

For download video, I recommend 700kbps for video and 96-160kbps for stereo audio. This will allow 640x480 looking excellent or 1280x720 looking OK. Music will sound very good to excellent.

Compressing for streaming - Slow broadband

Compressing for slow broadband (150 kbps or so) is much easier than compressing for dialup.
You can expect to get halfway decent video and acceptable audio.
Pauses and other streaming problems will be less common than on dialup.
I would recommend 100kbps for video and 22kbps for audio.
this will give you 320x240 video and decent mono audio.


For download video, I recommend 250 kbps for video and 56kbps for audio.
This permits 400x300 video and very good mono audio or decent stereo.
If the audio is speech recorded in stereo, I would recommend stereo. If the audio is primarily music, I would recommend mono audio.

compression for streaming - dialup users

Trying to compress video for dialup users is almost impossible. Whatever you do, the quality will be poor. You might even want to avoid trying and just target people with broadband.

You have almost no bandwidth to use (50 kbps max, and usually less than 40)

In order to provide even barely acceptable video, you have to encode for the best connections, and assume that the connection will stay above 40 kbps.

At 40 kbps, you only have 32 kbps for video and 8 kbps for audio.

In regards to video, this will allow you only 200x150 resolution or lower, and quality will be poor even at that small postage-stamp-like size.

In regards to audio, you will have to use mono audio, and speech will sound acceptable, but music will suffer.

With streaming video or progressive download, expect users to suffer from pauses and other streaming problems.

For download video, you can encode to a higher rate, as the video will not be watched until the download finishes.

I would recommend 100 kbps for video and 22 kbps for audio. This allows 320x240 resolution video and higher quality mono audio - speech will sound good, and music acceptable.