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Default Bitrates

If you leave out the AudioRepresentations or VideoRepresentations arrays from the Content Processing configuration section, we generate the default representations. This happens during the Encoding Phase.

Audio

For more information about audio representations, refer to this paragraph.

The default audio representations are as follows:

SoundAudioFormatBitrate (kbps)Create
StereoAAC128Always
MonoAAC64OnMatchingSound

This means that:

  1. We always generate stereo output (given that the source audio has stereo sound or better).
  2. If mono sound is present in the source, we generate mono output as well (independent of if stereo output was generated). If a source audio track only has stereo sound or better, we do not generate a mono audio track for it because we do not upmix audio channels.

Video

The following bitrate ladder templates are available for requesting the default video representations:

  1. V2: The current default ladder that provides sane bitrates for up to 1080p for H.264 and up to 4K for H.265.
  2. V1: A deprecated ladder. We do not recommend using it unless for backward compatibility reasons.

You can specify the template be setting BitrateLadder in ContentProcessing to either of these versions. Please see the Content Processing page for the example.

Bitrate Ladder Versions

V2

This is the default bitrate ladder.

In the V2 ladder we only define one side of the video dimension and the other side will be calculated dynamically while maintaining the source video’s display aspect ratio.

H.264/AVC
Width (px)Height (px)Bitrate (kbps)Quality Group
Dynamic234320SD
Dynamic360860SD
Dynamic4321130SD
Dynamic5401590SD
Dynamic7202450HD
Dynamic10804500HD
H.265/HEVC
Width (px)Height (px)Bitrate (kbps)Quality Group
Dynamic360320SD
Dynamic432860SD
Dynamic5401200SD
Dynamic7201850HD
Dynamic10803400HD
Dynamic14405230UHD1
Dynamic38409610UHD1

V1

The V1 bitrate ladder is available only for backward compatibility. We recommend using either V2 or (preferably) V2-VeryHigh.

H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC
16:9 Aspect Ratio
Width (px)Height (px)Bitrate (kbps)Quality Group
384216300SD
512288400SD
640360800SD
10245761200SD
12807202100HD
192010803000HD
256014404500UHD1
384021606000UHD1
4:3 Aspect Ratio
Width (px)Height (px)Bitrate (kbps)Quality Group
6404801100SD
10247682400HD
160014004200UHD1
204815364500UHD1
273220487000UHD1