Quote:
Bit Rate is not the only contributor to file size.
http://archive.today/8Gvov
Bit rate is the largest factor in file size, but not the only parameter.
Resolution plays a good part as does frame rate.
If nothing else is changed, then Bit Rate is the main factor.
No, Troy was correct here. If an overall bit rate for the stream is given it means exactly that: A video produced by this camera takes up X MBit/s on average. If at the same bit rate you change FPS or resolution, the file size will be unaffected, but the quality will change.
A fixed rate makes two assumptions:
1) The recording or playback device (SD card, DVD, network, ...) has a guaranteed sustained transfer rate of X MBit/s.
2) The playback device has X megabytes of memory that acts as a buffer to hold frames not yet played back.
For example, for a video blu-ray disk the rate has been defined to be 53,95 Mbit/s.
The video encoder now has to think ahead: It needs to make sure that the buffer doesn't run out of video frames to display, which can happen if they are too large to be transferred into the buffer in time at the give bit rate. On the up side it can write many small frames into the buffer ahead of time. E.g. a lot of highly compressed frames take their time to display, but are quick to transfer. This buys some time for a larger video frame. (Note: This results in two time stamps for a video frame: the presentation or display time and the time the frame appears in the stream at the fixed MBit/s.)
When offline converting videos at fixed bit rates, this is sometimes combined with 2-pass encoding. The first pass will analyze the video in relation to the target bit rate and buffer size to make best use of the buffer to achieve good quality. This requires looking ahead to see if following video frames may require more buffer space and the current frame thus needs to be compressed stronger. Where this is not possible, i.e. in live stream conversion you often get horrible blocking artifacts on fixed rate streams like TV broadcasts with a sudden change of scene.