You are all probably right about the bit rate only being relevant to image quality as playback is whats relevant to playback performance.
However, this only applies to a media file whos bit rate can be handled by the computer. That is, given two media files, both containing different but small enough bit rates that the processor can easily handle, will play out at the same frame rate. Assuming its a low frame rate that the monitor and computer can handle. But this is so because they can both be handled by the processor.
The reason that i came to this conclusion is becase I made a 1FPS animation but with a ridiculously high bit rate to see if it can playback properly. Sure enough, my computer, which is top notch, was not able to handle the playback. It kept choking up big time. The reason was simply because of the really high bit rate. This means that if the bit rate is too high, then it will not playback correctly.
Its the same thing with my animations, where i have the uncompressed versions and the RLE compressed versions, as the uncompressed versions cant play at faster than 4FPS, while the RLE versions, which are lossless, can play at faster than 60FPS. And when viewing the bit rate on both, the uncompressed version, besides having a really large size, had a really large bit rate, which is what caused it to playback slowly.
I then rendered the same animation with RLE encoding but looped it so that its size matched that of the uncompressed clip, and sure enough, even though it had the same size as the uncompressed clip, it ran at faster than 60FPS. The only difference between it and the uncompressed version was the bit rate, which means that bit rate does affect playback speed.
Of course, lower bit rates do impair quality, for audio or for video, but only when dealing with lossy compression. With lossless compression, like my Run Length Encoder, there is no image quality loss what so ever. And so, if both files are lossless and thus the same quality, but one has a smaller bit rate than the other, then the smaller one will play out faster than the larger one. But only if the files are above the computers processing threshold.
Conclusion:
- Bit rate does affect quality when dealing with lossy compression but not lossless compression.
- Lower bit rates run faster than higher bit rates only when they both exceed the computers processing capabilities, since two different bit rate files both below the computers processing threshold will play out at the same speed.
But why am i asking you guys if i knew this?
Well, simply put, because i wasn't sure. But in thinking it through after reading your replies and writing my own reply, i think that what im saying makes sense. At a basic level of course, since taken in depth will show many possibilities that contradict my theory.
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