The VideoLAN Forums

I´m trying to transcode videos to a target bitrate for streaming. I´m NOT interested on constant bitrate (which I know is not possible), but at least I want to get a certain AVERAGE bitrate so I can fit the video through a token bucket.
The problem is I find it impossible to predict the total video bitrate. I tried different muxers and codecs but, for example, if I select 32kpbs audio and 220kbps video (mux=TS, vcodec=H264), instead of getting an average 252kbps, I get 362kbps, wich is WAY too big.
Does anyone know how to predict the average output video bitrate or at least explain to me why I´m not getting what I ask VLC for?

Try using the --sout-ffmpeg-strict-rc switch to get a tighter control on bitrate, if using mp2v/mp4v/DIV3 (not positive on the last one, but it may work).

I'm not sure what would affect h264, unfortunately..

I'm surprised you're getting such a large delta, though. I did some test runs with h264 a handful of months back, 100, 200, 300K (using the --sout-transcode-fps switch to run frame rates < 10 fps), and the total file sizes were pretty close to the nominal rate.

Have you tried with no audio, just to verify that it's the video codec that is running oddly?