Constant bit rate (CBR) is a term used in telecommunications, relating to the quality of service. Compare with variable bit rate. Telecommunication is the extension of communication over a distance. ... In the fields of packet-switched networks and computer networking, the traffic engineering term Quality of Service (QoS) refers to the probability of the telecommunication network meeting a given traffic contract, or in many cases is used informally to refer the probability of a packet succeeding in passing between two... Variable bit rate (VBR) is a term used in telecommunications, relating to the quality of service. ...
When referring to codecs, constant bit rate encoding means that the rate at which a codec's output data should be consumed is constant. CBR is useful for streaming multimedia content on limited capacity channels since it is the maximum bit rate that matters, not the average, so CBR would be used to take advantage of all of the capacity. CBR would not be the optimal choice for storage as it would not allocate enough data for complex sections (resulting in degraded quality) while wasting data on simple sections. Codec is a portmanteau of either Compressor-Decompressor or Coder-Decoder, which describes a device or program capable of performing transformations on a data stream or signal. ...
Most coding schemes such as Huffman coding or run-length encoding produce variable-length codes, making perfect CBR difficult to achieve. This is partly solved by varying the quantization (quality), and fully solved by the use of padding. (However, CBR is implied in a simple scheme like reducing all 16-bit audio samples to 8-bits.) In computer science, Huffman coding is an entropy encoding algorithm used for lossless data compression. ...
When referring to codecs, constantbitrate encoding means that the rate at which a codec's output data should be consumed is constant.
CBR is useful for streaming multimedia content on limited capacity channels since it is the maximum bitrate that matters, not the average, so CBR would be used to take advantage of all of the capacity.
CBR would not be the optimal choice for storage as it would not allocate enough data for complex sections (resulting in degraded quality) while wasting data on simple sections.
ConstantBitRate (CBR) encoding is an encoding method that varies the quality level in order to ensure a consistent bitrate throughout an encoded file.
In order to maintain constantbitrate throughout the file, difficult passages (for example, passages containing a relatively wide stereo separation), may be encoded with fewer than the optimum number of bits.
ConstantBitRate encoding produces MP3 file sizes that are easily predicted by multiplying the bitrate by the duration.