How much bandwith is required to stream 1080p?

Question

I am wondering how much bandwith is required to stream a 1080p movie from for example Youtube. I am aware that there may be things such as compression that come in play here, but can anyone provide a good answer for this anyways?

Answer 1

Compressing using x264, a "typical" file ends up somewhere around 8GB for 100 minutes of movie. To stream this without problems, you need a speed of 8GB/100 minutes ~= 1.3MB/s ~= 10Mb/s.

It is directly dependent on compression rate (and more correctly: bitrate), though. Youtube compresses material quite strongly. Try downloading a 1080p Youtube video with some of the (many) available services and divide by length to get an average bitrate (or check the bitrate directly with some tool - your connection simply needs to be able to handle the audio+video bitrate).

Answer 2

I was able to calculate the bandwidth and storage for a 1080P video (with additional parameters) on this website:

http://stardot.com/bandwidth-and-storage-calculator

• H.264 compressed 1080P HD @ 30 FPS
• "High Video Quality" (not sure what that means)
• Average Frame Size: 50KB
• Bandwidth Required Per Camera: 12.0 Mbps
• Estimated Storage (24 hours per day * 31 days): 4 TB

Answer 3

I downloaded Netbalancer to figure out how much data streaming 1080p clips on youtube uses.

I tested 10 different clips from various users on youtube including videogamedunkey and cinemasins and found regardless if they are 1080p 60fps or just 1080p the clips used 660 - 680kBps equivalent to about a 5.5 megabit connection.

I'm not sure how youtube encodes but that speed was close to my ADSL connections max speed.

720p used anywhere between 320 - 370 kBps equivalent to 2.75 megabit

By defintion 1080p contains 2.25 times more pixels to 720p so this is pretty close - maybe youtube uses better encoding for 1080p.

Hope this helps.

Answer 4

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-bandwidth-requirement-to-stream-a-1080p-HD-movie-off-a-remote-server says youtube takes about 3.5-8 Mb/s

http://sonnati.wordpress.com/2011/09/15/bandwidth-is-running-out-lets-save-the-bandwidth/ says youtube takes 3.5 Mb/s though it wasn't clear if that was 720p or 1080p