Average bitrate
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Average bit rate refers to the average amount of data transferred per second. This is commonly referred to for digital music or video. An mp3 file, for example, that has an average bit rate of 128 kbit/s transfers, on average, 128,000 bits every second. It can have higher bit rate and lower bit rate parts, and the average bit rate is obtained by dividing the sum of the bit rate of each sample by the number of samples. Bit rate is not fully reliable as a measure of audio/video quality, as some formats such as wma and Vorbis produce higher sound quality than the standard mp3 format at the same bit rate.
Average bit rate can also refer to a form of variable bit rate encoding where the encoder will try to average the use of data for high and low complexity areas so that the bitrate of every audio segment averaged yields a specified bitrate.
