Topics

• What is Adaptive Bitrate?
• Advantages and Disadvantages
  • Advantages
  • Disadvantages
• Current Limitations
• Turning on Adaptive Bitrate for your Account
• Using Adaptive Bitrate

What is Adaptive Bitrate?

Adaptive Bitrate is a method that allows for and takes into account connection speed to serve the best version that connection can handle. To be as efficient as possible, the system also takes screen/embed size into account. (It won’t serve a 720p file to a video frame that is only 480 pixels tall, for example.)

Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages

• Serves the Best version to the user based on available bandwidth and video frame size.
• Adjusts automatically to avoid buffering when possible.
• Switches between more versions of the file (360p, 480p, 720p, and 1080p; older videos only use 480p and 720p) allowing for a greater range of quality settings.
• Provides the ability to manually choose a version from the above four options, instead of the default two.
• Fairly seamless transition between versions.

Disadvantages

Using Adaptive bitrate has the ability to utilize more bandwidth in some cases (scaling to 720p and 1080p automatically instead of requiring viewer interaction). This is generally dependent on your viewership and if they clicked the “HD” button in the player previously.

Current Limitations

• Adaptive Bitrate is only available in our Flash players (Full, Simple, Mini, and Chromeless) at this time. We are working on implementing systems for mobile devices, however.
• Source files of 480p resolution or less will result in the 480p version being served to all viewers; no seamless switching to 360p will occur.

This feature is only available to videos uploaded on or after July 18, 2012

Turning on Adaptive Bitrate for your Account

To Enable/Disable Adaptive Bitrate, head over to your Player Settings page and choose the “Adaptive” option:

Using Adaptive Bitrate

When you enable the Adaptive option, the player control bar will change slightly:

The quality selector turns into a gear icon. Clicking on this icon brings up a small menu that allows you to set the quality manually:

An arrow will denote the version currently being served. The highlighted version (Auto in the image above) is the mode that is selected. When manually switching the player may take a few seconds to change playback to the version you selected.

*This feature is not available for entry level plans, if you are interested in this feature please contact 1-888-444-1119