I do know what a bitrate means and that a higher bitrate can potentially produce a higher quality.
However CBR vs VBR can produce very different quality, at a same bitrate - additionally remember all the other parameters that can be used when encoding a video.
I can produce a terrible quality with a high bitrate and a great quality with a much lower bitrate, very much depending on the encoder, encoder settings and the actual content.
So bitrate is not perse the best (or only) parameter to determine the quality of a video.
On that note:
Some sort of reference would be nice indeed of course, and (which is just as wrong) for that purpose I use the file size.
On top of that ... ffProbe will not always report a video bitrate or an average video bitrate.
You can test this yourself, with the ffprobe call I showed you before.
There is the option to right click a file and selecting "Copy Directory path to clipboard" - unfortunately there is a bug with that function (fixed in the next release).
Output (shortened):
[streams.stream.0]
...
codec_name=hevc
codec_long_name=H.265 / HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding)
codec_type=video
...
bit_rate=N/A
max_bit_rate=N/A
bits_per_raw_sample=N/A
...
[streams.stream.1]
...
codec_name=dts
codec_long_name=DCA (DTS Coherent Acoustics)
profile=DTS-HD MA
codec_type=audio
...
sample_rate=48000
...
bit_rate=N/A
max_bit_rate=N/A
bits_per_raw_sample=24
...
[format]
filename=/Volumes/AllShares/Multimedia/Movies/__4K/10 Things I Hate About You (1999)/10 Things I Hate About You (1999) 2160p.mkv
nb_streams=4
nb_programs=0
format_name=matroska,webm
format_long_name=Matroska / WebM
start_time=0.000000
duration=5856.395000
size=17769326553
bit_rate=24273398
probe_score=100
As you can see no video or audio bitrate reported by ffProbe - except for the TOTAL (under [format]).
If these guys do not report it, then there is an extremely high chance that they do not have a way to accurately calculate or estimate the bitrate either. And the ffMPEG team has been at it for a very long time. So in this particular example, I wouldn't even know where to begin ...
As for the bitrate listed under "format" - doing the math with other video files that do list bitrates: it really is not just as simple as Audio bitrate + Video bitrate = Total bitrate (when using regular or average bitrates). I also noticed that the total bitrate of video files with multiple audio tracks, at times gets close to the sum of Video Bitrate + all Audio bitrates.
It's not filesize / duration either ... (have you noticed that not all streams are equal in length either?)
So what are we supposed to show here?
Before you say "total bitrate" - do know that you're misleading yourself when there are multiple audio tracks ... or when there are different formatted audio tracks (eg. 5.1 vs 7.1 etc).
Next issue 🤣 ... kByte (1000 bytes - more common for transfer rates, so I'm guessing this one) or KByte (1024 bytes)? (source: kilobyte)
I also noticed that quite a few report in megabytes per second as well ...
All in all - it will have some impact on the design. I've tinkered with it the past 2 days now, but I'm not very pleased with the results yet ...