How to set the bitrate with ffmpeg

About

The bitrate with ffmpeg is a parameter that sets the quality of your video.

You can set the bitrate:

• directly by giving a value with b:v (if you care about the exact file size)

ffmpeg -i input_video.mp4 -b:v 10M output_video.mp4

• or indirectly by giving the Constant Rate Factor (CRF) of the encoding scheme ¹⁾- if you want to retain good visual quality and don't care about the exact bitrate or filesize of the encoded file.