Streaming videos has now become an essential part of our lives and defining streaming isn’t an ‘island found’ for internet users today, whether you’re streaming 1-minute videos on YouTube up to streaming hours of movies on Netflix! An ideal internet speed for streaming HD videos and watching the video content available on the web without buffering will need a high internet speed. While streaming short videos on YouTube, worrying about the internet speed should not be much of an issue. The issue comes into play when considering streaming larger High Definition (HD) videos on sites like Netflix, and even Netflix is guiding its consumers on the recommended internet speed to be used and managed! It is therefore very important to know the ideal internet speed for streaming HD videos.
This then raises the question: what internet speed would be ideal to stream HD videos? Read on to know more.
What are HD videos?
As previously stated, HD stands for High Definition. For an image to be classified as HD, it needs to have about 720 lines of pixels in it from top to bottom. The upper limit for HD classification is 1080 lines of pixels.
What about HD videos? Videos are basically moving pictures. For a video to be regarded as HD, there is a certain speed at which it should be able to move. The minimum rate for this is 720p.
However, in order for this to happen, a lot depends on the hardware that you are using to view the video. Your device –TV, computer, or smartphone — should be able to support 720p before you would be able to get a video at HD quality.
What Internet Speed is Ideal for Streaming HD Videos?
When streaming HD videos, with perfect quality, you inquire about an internet speed that is capable of handling a progressive scan rate or bitrate of 720p. Calculating the required speed for streaming HD videos just requires a little bit of math. To start with, you have to be sure of the file size of the video being streamed. This has a lot to do with the file type. For example, if a one-hour 720p video has a file type of MPEG-2, it would have a size of about 2.7 GB. On the other hand, if the file type is H.264/Advanced Video Calling (AVC), the size would be about 13GB.
Let’s assume that the video you want to stream has a file size of 6GB, here is how you calculate the internet speed that you would need to stream it effectively:
- Approximate size in megabytes: 6GB x 1024 = 6155MB.
- Approximate size in megabits: 6,114 MB x 8 = 49,152Mb (1 byte = 8 bits)
- Number of seconds in an hour = 60 x 60 = 3600.
- Number of Megabits needed per second = 49152/3600 = 13.65 Mbps.
So what does this mean? This means that to effectively stream this video that we took as an example, you need an internet connection speed of 13.65Mbps!
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