[vorbis] bit rate

[Stan Seibert]

On Thu, 2003-09-25 at 17:17, engdev wrote:
> It has been said many times on this list that Vorbis is naturally VBR. But I
> was under the impression that streaming perfomed best using CBR.
> 
> So, why?

I've never heard of streaming "performing better" with CBR, but rather
that streaming requires some level of bitrate control because bandwidth
is the limiting factor.  For those situations, a capped-VBR would also
be fine to ensure that the buffers on the client side were not draining
during playback.  Of course, if you are streaming at very low bitrates,
you'll probably ride so close to the cap that it would essentially be
CBR.

The only other argument I've heard for CBR is applications which need to
assume a fixed conversion from bytes in to samples out of the decoder. 
(Usually in the sense that the application wasn't designed with VBR in
mind, like AVI without the VBR hacks.)  This doesn't have much to do
with streaming though.


---
Stan Seibert

<p>--- >8 ----
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