Bandwidth estimation / calculation

Question

I'm working on a new project (web page) where people can upload their creations (video format). Before starting to code, I need to make a plan, calculations. I know video streaming "eats" a lot of bandwidth, this is why I need to calculate the bandwidth for each video and an acceptable quality.

I know streaming a full HD (1920p) video "eats" 7 ~ 9 megabit / s for 1 client. Actually I'm trying to find the best solutions: less bandwidth & acceptable quality.

What's the best acceptable quality (dimension)? 860p or higher?

I found a pretty good company here in my country, where I could collocate a dedicated server with 1 GB of bandwidth and for an acceptable price. How many video stream could the bandwidth accept?

Answer 1

The best acceptable quality depends on the display and resizing algorithms used... a well encoded 360p video will often look great to most people on a large 1080p display if its upsized well. On a 640p phone display 160p might look great to most people.

It also depends immensely on the codecs used. As well as depending greatly on the video content (high motion will require more bits to encode well)...

There is no real answer to this, and you haven't given a great starting point for even a rule of thumb answer. Sorry but you'll need to encode and evaluate videos of different dimensions, bitrates, and codecs and determine what quality loss is acceptable for yourself. "best acceptable quality" is an entirely subjective question.