Follow our guidelines on video export settings to get the best quality output for your content in Qiwio.
Best Export Settings for Audio and Video
Before you start uploading to your Qiwio account, get familiar with our recommendations for video settings, file formats, and video resolution. This will make uploading easier, and you will end up with top quality web encodes for your videos!
Export settings are configured when you publish or export a video from your editing/creation tools. Qiwio has a few ideal specifications we recommend when you export a video prior to uploading:
Video
- File Type: MP4 (recommended)
- Codec: h.264/AVC (recommended)
- Resolution: between 640px and 3840px wide
- Bitrate: 5,000–8,000 kbps (recommended)
- Frame rate: constant, 15–60 frames per second
- Aspect Ratio: We accept videos of any aspect ratio, but wider = higher quality
Audio
- Codec: AAC (Advanced Audio Codec)
- Sample Rate: 44.1 kHz
- Channels: 2-channel Stereo (not surround)
How to Get the Best Quality Output for Your Video
After you upload a video to Qiwio, these assets will be encoded at various sizes and quality levels to ensure a great viewing experience across a wide array of devices and networks. The original file you upload does not get delivered via the Qiwio player, we will only serve the optimized media assets we create.
Formats Qiwio Supports
Our system accepts many common file formats, but for the most consistent performance we recommend exporting video files in MP4 format (suggested) with the H.264 codec.
For non-MP4 video uploads, we will re-encode the video to MP4 after you upload. Below are a list of file formats that Qiwio accepts:
Media Type |
Formats Accepted |
Video |
MOV, MPG, AVI, FLV, F4V, MP4, M4V, ASF, WMV, MKV, DIVX, XVID, WEBM |
Images |
JPG, PNG |
Adaptive Streaming
Qiwio's player uses HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) to deliver the best possible version of your video at any given time. This means that the Qiwio plater will switch quality streams depending on the internet speed available, by making regular checks on the viewer's connection. Qiwio's adaptive streaming will automatically choose the highest quality version of the video to serve your viewers without buffering. This is also informed by the size of the embedded video - if you've embedded a video at a small size like 640x360 wide, we won't serve a 1920x1080 asset to that space as it's an inefficient use of bandwidth. However if the viewer enters fullscreen, we'll scale up to the highest quality available if the connection can handle it.
If Qiwio detects a slower connection initially but the connection speed improves during playback, the plater will start on a lower quality, then switch to a higher quality stream based on this detection. The viewers don't have to touch anything!
File Sizes
Uploading within the Qiwio app supports file sizes of up to 2GB. One of the key ways to manage file sizes of your videos is to export them with a reasonable bit rate. For videos, we recommend going no higher than 10,000 Kbps, and most uploaded videos can be kept in the 5,000–8,000 Kbps range unless they include a lot of finite detail.
If you find yourself with a video under 1 hour long that is larger than 2GB, it’s likely that a compression step was missed, and you may want to re-export the media with a lower bit rate.
Qiwio encodes versions of your video with specific maximum bit rates, so a higher bit rate on the original file isn’t necessarily problematic — However staying within the recommended range of 5,000–7,000 Kbps is mainly to keep your file size down, as well as ensuring a shorter upload time.