GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 418372
Bitrate of video is very often N/A
Last modified: 2007-03-15 08:48:43 UTC
Many people would expect a number hear. Of course it depends on how the video got encoded. It can be variable, but in that case I would prefer that gstreamer would report a kind of average. Possibly just obtained by dividing the file size by it's length.
Presumably you mean that you see "N/A" in totem. In this case, the decoder element did not report a bitrate, either because nobody wrote code for the decoder to do so, or because the bitrate is variable or not known. Some bitstreams do not contain this information. Reporting average bitrate over an entire file is nearly useless, since average bitrate has very little correspondence to a constant bitrate. I don't see much use in spending developer time to provide "low value" information. Also, this bitrate would be for the file, not the audio or video stream. It might make sense to report "bitrate: variable" and then provide periodic statistics as to the instantaneous bitrate. This would best be done with a separate element in the pipeline that calculates and reports the statistics. I'm closing this bug report, since it's not really a bug. Feel free to open bug reports on particular decoder elements that are doing a poor job at reporting bitrates, preferably with patches.