What is Bit Rate?

[nbstl68]

Hi, maybe a dumb question but what is the "bit Rate"?...Does that selection determine, if my camera is recording in 1080, 2MP, 3MP resolution or am i misunderstanding it?
With my 3MP QSee cameras I see in the NVR a drop box several bit rate options...Is it always optimal to select the highest bit rate?

The output of my cameras I see on screen are not that great, so I increased it to the max selection but they do not seem to appear any better.

 

[andyblac]

bitrate.
think of it like quality, the higher the bitrate the better quality of the image will be. as to the quality it depends of what the cams bitrate max is.

1080/3MP/4MP
is the size of the image.

 

[hikvision]

you can say that Bit-rate is the amount of the picture details sent in 1 second
so the higher the bit-rate the higher quality you get
but you have to keep in mind that the High bit-rate consumes the line bandwidth

 

[nbstl68]

Hmm...So I have all of my cameras set to their highest bit rate and I think the video is worse?...Esp night is now good for still but more grainy and fuzzy for motion as in me walking by.
I'm going to try to reset to default and see if it comes back.

I see others talking about Hikvision cameras and all these settings they can tweak like BLC, 2D/3D DNR, AWB, AGC, WDR, shutter adj, frame rate adj, bit rate adj.

Mine ( QSee 3MP QTN8037B) apparently don't have those adjustments when talking with tech support?
The spec sheet says it has DWDR & 3D DNR but no way to adjust them?...only bit rate and a few things like whit bal, color...can't even force the IR to be off, (which I want to do for one of them.)

I'm not seeing a lot of QSee discussion on this site...Are they just not as good a quality cam \ NVR setup?

 

[nbstl68]

I have this combo from Sam's.
DVR:QT8516Cameras:QTN8037B (3MP)

http://www.samsclub.com/sams/qsee-16x8-1080p-8-3mp-bllt-2tb-hdd/prod19020549.ip

Seriously thinking of returning it. Not a lot of adjustibility, can't even access the cameras directly, (...or am I being overly optimistic to think I could get much better for under $1k (it was on sale at the time)?