Use different video quality levels

Introducing video quality levels

Mux Video supports encoding content with different video quality levels. The video quality level informs the quality, cost, and available platform features for the asset.

Plus

The plus video quality level encodes your video at a consistently high-quality level. Assets encoded with the plus quality use an AI-powered per-title encoding technology that boosts bitrates for high-complexity content, ensuring high-quality video, while reducing bitrates for lower-complexity content to save bandwidth without sacrificing on quality.

The plus quality level incurs a cost per video minute of encoding.

Basic

The basic video quality level uses a simpler encoding ladder, with a lower target video quality.

There is no charge for video encoding when using basic quality.

Set a video quality level when creating an asset

The video quality of an asset is controlled by setting the video_quality attribute on your create-asset API callAPI, so to create an asset with the basic quality level, you should set "video_quality": "basic" as shown below.

// POST /video/v1/assets
{
	"input": "https://storage.googleapis.com/muxdemofiles/mux.mp4",
	"playback_policy": [
		"public"
	],
	"video_quality": "basic"
}

And of course you can also select the video_quality within Direct Uploads, too; you just need to set the same "video_quality": "basic" field in the new_asset_settings of your create-direct-upload API callAPI.

// POST /video/v1/uploads
{
  "new_asset_settings": {
    "playback_policy": [
      "public"
    ],
    "video_quality": "basic"
  },
  "cors_origin": "*"
}

Supported features

Assets using different video quality levels have different features or limits available to them. Refer to the below table for more details: