What does video quality actually mean?

[OttoKerner]

See this thread and the embedded youtube video. It has some great background info:

Bandwidth calculation error

A file created with ‘constant quality’ cannot have a constant bandwidth. ‘Bandwidth’ has only indirectly to do with ‘quality’. If you want to learn about that a bit more, it is explained in a great way in this video: With ‘constant quality’, the encoder uses whatever bandwidth is necessary to achieve the desired quality. And this varies very wildly over the course of the file. That’s why Plex performs an in-depth bandwidth analysis, which provides a much better way to determine the real ba…