Low Bitrate Videos

I've been experimenting with very low bitrate encoding for a few years, including winning a couple of low-bitrate film festivals. After lots of experimentation with lots of esoteric codec combinations and weird containers, we've reached a point where AV1 is Good Enough and fast enough.. I can encode h265 videos that are slightly smaller for more or less the same visual quality, but they won't play back in a browser and they're only marginally smaller. I can also encode h265 videos that are much smaller, for significantly worse visual quality. H265 videos do encode about 5x as fast, as AV1 videos, but that doesn't have a huge impact on things for me right now, esepecially since they don't play back in browser. AV1 makes small enough files that look good enough and can be played back in enough common places that it makes sense to use it in production.

Why?

Because not everyone has multi-gigabit fiber running to their homes, and not everyone is watching videos on 80" TVs, and even if we all were, data transfer and data storage still comes at a cost, financially and environmentally. On an individual file basis, that cost might currently be negligble, but the carbon footprint of streaming services is likely only to grow with time.

Other reasons, too, probably. Smaller files are easier to transfer and store. Right now, I'm averaging just under 100 Kilobits per second, or about 45 MB per hour. At that rate, video can fit in a lot of places, and through a lot of distribution mechanisms, that were previously inaccessible.

But what does it look like?

Here's my entry for the Small File Media Festival 2026

It's 156 KB, with a bitrate of 15kbps