"Practical" Preppers

About Practical Preppers

Practical Preppers offers unique and innovative approaches to being prepared for what may lie ahead. We believe whole heartedly that to be truly prepared means having a plan, the equipment, and the knowledge to handle any unexpected situation. Our approach allows us to focus on our client's home and creative custom solution to meet their needs. 

Our Approach

Our passion is learning more and more about enjoying our homes and living independently, while keeping costs as low as possible. Most investigations involve hands-on research. There are lots of inventions that, when we read about them, seem to offer inventive and economic approaches to common preparedness problems. Too frequently, the neat idea is lost in poor execution. We seek to keep our customers from dealing with such surprises. This principle extends to all of the products we recommend to our customers. We have installed and tested every product we might recommend.

Low-tech experimentation

We are constantly experimenting, seeking ways to use and modify commercially available devices, to increase their value in grid-down scenarios. We try every combination we can think of, that might be practical, to come up with low-tech, low-expense approaches to getting more from the equipment that people already have. Our general rule is: Easier is better. That includes using parts that are generally available. We are thoroughly familiar with metal fabrication and other ways to repurpose devices. However, as much as possible, we work on approaches that minimize the skills required to use them.

One of many examples

We have worked on a number of ways to heat water, in a home, if the electric grid goes down. For example, we have tried different ways to heat water using a wood stove. What makes this more of a challenge than in years past is that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) no longer allows coils inside a wood stove. You cannot order a stove with a coil inside, unless it is a cook stove. The easiest way to heat water from a fire is, obviously, running water through a pipe that runs directly through the heart of the fire. So, we sought other approaches to heat water, using an existing stove, while maintaining EPA compliance. We attached a commercially-available metal coil onto the outside of the back of a wood stove, and connected the piping it to a storage tank. We first tried it as a passive siphon -- that is, without using a pump to circulate the water. In another experiment we used the same setup, with the addition of a little 12-volt pump. This kind of experimenting is what we do all the time.

Higher-difficulty, low-tech experiments

We also tackle higher-difficulty projects. Bigger or more difficult projects make sense when there are big payoffs. Taking just two examples, we have used wood to power a pickup truck and to generate all the electric power for a home. Specifically, we:

1. Modified a gasifier and mounted it in the bed of a 1962 Ford pickup truck. We then made the modifications necessary to connect its output to air intake of the engine. We now have a pickup truck that is fueled on wood!
2. Used the output of the wood gasifier in the pickup to power an electric generator. The generator was connected to the electrical system of a house. It was set up so that, when a switch was thrown, the power source was switched from the grid, to drawing its power from the generator.

Playing within the rules

Even our more novel and difficult experiments are designed so that all the rules are followed. So, if it works, the results are meaningful and create no risk with any authorities. For example, prior to the house power cutover, we secured the approval of the local power company.

These experiments help our clients

The many products and technologies available to preppers can be traded off in a wide variety of ways. Our research, testing and experimentation keeps us current on the available options. This includes refining our ideas of what options are appropriate to clients with different skill sets. See the Products section of this site for specific examples of the sort of tradeoffs we help clients with.

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Eyes Wide Shut

I. ‘Doomsday’

Peering beyond scientific reticence.

It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.

Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.

Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault — a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten years after being built.

The Doomsday vault is fine, for now: The structure has been secured and the seeds are safe. But treating the episode as a parable of impending flooding missed the more important news. Until recently, permafrost was not a major concern of climate scientists, because, as the name suggests, it was soil that stayed permanently frozen. But Arctic permafrost contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere. When it thaws and is released, that carbon may evaporate as methane, which is 34 times as powerful a greenhouse-gas warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged on the timescale of a century; when judged on the timescale of two decades, it is 86 times as powerful. In other words, we have, trapped in Arctic permafrost, twice as much carbon as is currently wrecking the atmosphere of the planet, all of it scheduled to be released at a date that keeps getting moved up, partially in the form of a gas that multiplies its warming power 86 times over.

But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough. Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias, perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination. The reasons for that are many: the timid language of scientific probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called “scientific reticence” in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was; the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem worth addressing; the way that climate denialism has made scientists even more cautious in offering speculative warnings; the simple speed of change and, also, its slowness, such that we are only seeing effects now of warming from decades past; our uncertainty about uncertainty, which the climate writer Naomi Oreskes in particular has suggested stops us from preparing as though anything worse than a median outcome were even possible; the way we assume climate change will hit hardest elsewhere, not everywhere; the smallness (two degrees) and largeness (1.8 trillion tons) and abstractness (400 parts per million) of the numbers; the discomfort of considering a problem that is very difficult, if not impossible, to solve; the altogether incomprehensible scale of that problem, which amounts to the prospect of our own annihilation; simple fear. But aversion arising from fear is a form of denial, too.

In between scientific reticence and science fiction is science itself. This article is the result of dozens of interviews and exchanges with climatologists and researchers in related fields and reflects hundreds of scientific papers on the subject of climate change. What follows is not a series of predictions of what will happen — that will be determined in large part by the much-less-certain science of human response. Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action. It is unlikely that all of these warming scenarios will be fully realized, largely because the devastation along the way will shake our complacency. But those scenarios, and not the present climate, are the baseline. In fact, they are our schedule.

Complete Article

Gather information by the tons, "Black Vault".

You’ve stumbled upon the largest privately run online repository of declassified government documents anywhere in the world. With more than 2 MILLION pages of documents to read, on nearly every government secret imaginable, The Black Vault is known worldwide for getting down to the truth… and nothing but.

Every document in this archive was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Begun in 1996, at the age of 15, John Greenewald, Jr., began hammering the U.S. Government with FOIA requests to obtain information. The Black Vault is the result of that more than two decade effort.

Seek and you shall find.

 Please use a bit of common sense as some documents may have been altered.

Today my posts may have angered my viewers

 I'm not a preacher, teacher, politician or someone that needs your nod or vote. I do not mince words nor am I a "people pleaser". I speak the truth as I see it.

Iowa Rep. Steve King says America is heading toward another civil war

The beginning of America's bloody Civil War is generally remembered as the opening shot on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861. 

And Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, fears another Fort Sumter is in our near future. 

"America is heading in the direction of another Harpers Ferry," the controversial conservative tweeted Sunday. "After that comes Ft. Sumter."

King's tweet linked to an article from the conservative online news site PJ Media about a group of protesters who were staging an "occupy"-style campout in front of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement holding facility in Portland, Ore. 

Harper's Ferry, Va., was the site of an 1859 raid on a federal armory led by militant abolitionist John Brown. Brown's attack was aimed at sparking a massive slave uprising and the violent act helped push the divided country toward civil war. 

Political emotions have been running high in recent weeks after a massive public outcry against the administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy when it resulted in the systematic separation of migrant families. 

More: Rep. Steve King retweets prominent Nazi sympathizer, sparks controversy — again

More: Steve King campaign mocks the 'look' of Parkland survivor Emma Gonzalez in Facebook post

STORY FROM EXXONMOBIL

The quest for efficiency

See more →

King's concern that the U.S. could be heading for another violent, internal conflict has been echoed by many voices in recent days after two administration officials were driven from restaurants because of opposition to their political views. 

A call from Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., for activists to ramp up such harassment has further fueled concern that civility in American politics has eroded. 

King himself has a history of remarks that have been criticized as inflammatory, divisive and racist. For example, he once said, "We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies," in a tweet about immigration and shifting demographics. 

King also recently mocked the appearance of Parkland, Fla., shooting survivor Emma Gonzalez and retweeted a known Nazi sympathizer who has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler. 

More: Rep. Steve King blasted for 'our civilization' tweet

More: People are canceling their Iowa vacations because of Steve King's words

Raul Reyes: GOP owns Steve King's racism

Gender neutral parenting – has it gone too far?

*If your kids aren't fucked up, your grandkids will be.

xpecting our first baby, my husband and I told my father-in-law that, whatever the sex of our unborn child, we would call it "Baby" - and raise it gender neutral. He saw through our pseudo-liberal joke immediately, but in lots of ways we weren't actually kidding. We are millennial parents (albeit at the elderly end of that cohort) and we were interested in ideas of bringing up our daughter without the life-limiting shackles of being assigned a pink dolly at birth, and so on.

To those parents who have already successfully raised perfectly capable humans without stressing about this, the whole concept of gender neutrality can be a bit of a marmalade dropper, or at the very least an eye-roller. At its more extreme end, it evokes stark images of children not being told what sex they are, banned from playing with the toys they crave, and dressed only in grey or khaki babywear.

But the issue is certainly trending at the moment. Celebrities such as Paloma Faith have said they will be raising their children gender neutral (Faith said she wouldn't reveal the sex of her first born, though it turned out that she meant "to the media", not to the child, as panicked headlines suggested). John Lewis stirred the pot further when it announced it would drop the labels "boys" and "girls" on its childrenswear.

So it's fashionable, but backed up by research, too. One study in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that children subject to strict gender expectations are at an increased risk for mental and physical health problems during and after adolescence. A separate study published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology found that kids enrolled in the Sweden's gender-neutral kindergarten system had access to more opportunities, which the researchers predicted would equate to more success as adults.

There was also a BBC documentary last year, No More Boys and Girls: Can Our Kids Go Gender Free?, which followed a class of seven-year-olds. It observed that girls called themselves pretty, but had lower self-esteem than the boys, while boys had a limited vocabulary when describing their emotions. Wanting the best for our child (like all parents), my husband and I made a conscious effort to tell our daughter, from birth, how brave and strong and intelligent she was, instead of how "pretty" (it's quite hard to ascribe intelligence to an immobile spud that just feeds and sleeps, but we did our best); and we bought her the cult book Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls - about female astronauts, engineers and civil rights campaigners - along with toy cars and Lego and dinosaur baby-grows. Not a dolly in sight.

Our bemused parents played along, gamely. Not that either of them had raised us in a world of pink and princesses (me) or macho boy stuff (my husband). I was very into my dad's old toy cars, along with dolls, whereas my husband loved to draw and play sport. But somewhere between my childhood in the early Eighties and today, female childhood seemed to become saturated in a pink hue. And my generation of parents have felt the need to respond with campaigns like Pink Stinks and Let Toys be Toys. But have we taken it too far?

Helen Wills, the blogger actuallymummy.co.uk, who has a 13-year-old daughter, Maddie, and 11-year-old son, Evan, says that she sees "quite a lot of angst from parents of younger girls". Her advice? "Chill the heck out," she laughs. "The important thing is to be aware what they enjoy, expose them to everything and don't jump to the conclusion that if your little girl loves pink her mind's been warped by a patriarchal society."

Ok, I'm sick to my stomach, you can take it from here

SECRET TRICKS EVERY COP USES ON YOU

"You can't handle the truth"

 I don't give a shit about human life and neither do most of you. Can you at least be honest "with yourself" about how you felt when you saw dead ISIS soldiers?

 OH! So you care about human life but "you get to pick who"?!

 After the death I've seen in my life, I'm desensitized to it all and having one of those high IQ's makes it even worse. Death begins (Actually before) when daddy's sperm enters mom's egg, from that point on you're going to die, a little sooner, a little later really doesn't matter.

 If it comes down to you and my puppy hanging off a cliff and I can only choose one, I hope you said goodbye to your kids.

 You might not want me to run ads for you anymore LOL LOL LOL

The Alpha and Omega of America

 Some are getting highly upset about America's current political, moral, ethical, financial and overall position in the world. Not me...

 Face facts, America began with the lie of being discovered by Christopher Columbus, he discovered a land that was already in use by the American Indians and had been visited by the Lief Erickson and quite a few others.

 I sit back in complete amusement at the whole damn thing, my great grandmother a pure Blackfoot Indian, I bet she's smiling. But more than that I made it a point to get an education, always have a passport and funds to escape this raggedy piece of shit.

 I could never grasp the reasons for destroying something that provides such intense pleasure and amusement?

 Anyway, here "some" sit interpreting very well what an impeachment process would do = Stalemate!

I would imagine some are concerned for their future and the future of their children, no my circus, not my monkey.

And there must be a vast majority of individuals that lack education, talent, the balls and or finances to leave if they wanted to, tough titty.

 In my life time, America has bounced from one economic bubble to the next as each has burst. My good friend Scott Ellis, head of the Brevard Co. Clerk of Courts could inform you much better than myself.

*Curses are like chickens; they always come home to roost.

 Many would agree that America has gone too far = Sponsoring war around the world in the name of democracy when we're a capitalist country. Fighting for faggots to introduce that bullshit into the school curriculum for straight kids. Using the Bible as a weapon to abuse your children by telling them they will go to hell unless they follow your indoctrinated garbage. American airports with all sorts of ads about human trafficking, but most pretend the US's hands are clean. You even have people believing that the Great Depression was authentic. The list of atrocities is vast.

 Obama and his people failed to pay back on the national debt which moved us from triple "A" status to a double "A" status.

 America, you have your hands full!

Look for yourself.

 I will never hope for someone's downfall and I will not add to a person or groups downfall But... I will kick back on my yacht, eat some crab legs, play with my puppy and watch as all things transpire.

 America began as a deceitful and hateful place and the end seems to mimic the beginning, lie on top of lie on top of lie.

 Before I get a ton of emails, I served this country honorably on more than one occasion, remember that.

How does, "Intro / Outro, Concrete & Abstract" work?

 With just "some" of the cards on the table, president Trump has shown his capacity to lie, manipulate, practice infidelity, back track and this is just the beginning of many more revelations to come. Here's what the status quo, for the most part, don't see.
 President Trump's "base" has to fundamentally agree with these traits as they are the abstract of his concrete. *You can flip the abstract and concrete around, whatever floats your boat. When you have the ability to see that it's your neighbor, co-worker, perhaps even your significant other that is all fucked up, just maybe change will begin.

According to CNN Catholic priest "reported" sex abuse began in 1950

 "Anyone" with 2 brain cells to rub together would agree that this began shortly after the founding of the church around 4 BC. This would suggest the cover ups began around 4 BC.
*Now all of a sudden the pope is going to speak out because of course, "He's never heard of such things". 
 Now as you read this post, you've never spoken out either huh? You weren't guilty of the crime, your child wasn't touched so you had no responsibility in the matter. You're just as guilty as the priests.

Get your product or service noticed

When it's all said and done

 Many years ago I worked for IBM in Gaithersburg, MD. I was young, gung ho, looking to earn my stripes and make big changes, chuckles. My immediate supervisor, "Don" looked at me one day and said, "I appreciate your efforts Nick but would you like to see the changes you'll make here at this IBM before you move on"? I said, "Yes".

 He continued by saying, "Pour a glass of water and note the level. Then stick your finger in the glass and pull it out. That's the difference you'll make when it's all said and done".

Agenda 21? The Plan To Depopulate 95% Of The World By 2030

The United Nations for some people conjure up images of a benevolent organization intended for the preservation of human life wherever conflict occurs, and of encouraging international cooperation and peace. Far from this peaceful image, however, is their little-publicized plan to depopulate 95% of the world by 2030. Thus, it is no wild conspiracy theory, but fact.

And they called this UN plot: Agenda 21.

Local Government Implementation of Agenda 21

The local government implementation of Agenda 21 was prepared by ICLEI for the Earth Council’s Rio+5 Forum (April 13-19, 1997 — Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), for the 5th Session of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, and for the UN General Assembly’s “Earth Summit+5” Special Session.

United Nations plot to depopulate 95% of the world by 2030

Agenda 21 was United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for Sustainable Development and was apparently developed as a means of restructuring the world population to lessen environmental impact and achieve an improved quality of life. One of the main ways of achieving this, however, is through encouraged and direct depopulation.

Although the language used in the original 70-page report that the UN published on Agenda 21 is vague and open to interpretation, as well as plausible deniability, the intentions in certain sections are clear. Depopulation to lessen environmental impact and stop overpopulation leading to instability.

While this sounds like a positive thing in some aspects, mere policy changes at governmental level alone cannot create an environment where big enough changes can come about in a short space of time.

Global epidemic: Huge scale depopulation in short time

To achieve such huge scale depopulation with a relatively short deadline the actions were taken would have to be drastic. Either a world war, global epidemic or some kind of widespread starvation caused by massive crop failures would be the only likely ways of achieving this.

The idea also raises the question of which 5% of the global population would be saved? Would these be those strong and hardy enough to survive the conditions placed on the earth that would kill off the remaining 95%, or perhaps the survivors would be chosen selectively from the elite and wealthy? And those who wake up to this evil reality will be imprisoned in FEMA camps before their death. Is this what they are built for?

Whether such a plan could ever actually be successful is another matter. Plans of this size and scope would require the collusion and agreement of at least every first world government in the world, not to mention that the number of resources and effort that would have to go into keeping something like this covered up would be astronomical.

To read the full document click here:

www.un.org/...

Learn more about Agenda 21

Watch the short video below to learn more about Agenda 21, in under 5 minutes.

What bitrate should I use when encoding my video?

 I'm currently using "Debut Video Capture Free", what can I say? It is what it is.

How do I optimize my video for the web?

Derek Stanley

In this article we will go over some recommendations for compressing your videos for delivery through the Amazon S3 servers.

A scenario you might be familiar with is that you have filmed and edited your content into a package that meets your needs, but once you go to view your video on your website it takes forever to load or the video stutters during playback. This problem is not necessarily a bad encoding, but it could be the result of not encoding your video to a targeted connection speed.

In an ideal world you would be able to load your uncompressed video directly onto the web and end users would be able to view the file. Unfortunately, the quantity of data present along with the bandwidth limitations of your clients, makes this an impossibility at this point in time.

To reduce the data being pushed through your video you will have to perform a compression using a codec, which was covered in our previous article here:

My video has no sound or picture, am I using the right codec? What is a codec anyway?

Which Container and Codec Should I Use?

As previously mentioned in the article linked above the container is simply a way of packaging together the audio and video stream while delineating how they are compressed.

When choosing between the MP4, MOV, FLV, WMV and AVI containers, MP4 is the best option. The complexity of the MOV container can cause devices to stall when playing video. The FLV container is only supported by the Flash plugin, which is not supported by the new HTML5 standard and Apple mobile devices such as the iPhone. The WMV container requires specialized plugins and is generally only supported by Microsoft products such the Zune, or Silverlight. The AVI container is not meant for web distribution, as it is targeted at desktop players (it is also not supported for web playback through our own players, but it is listed here to clear any confusion on the container).

The MP4 container is almost universally supported: Apple, Microsoft, Flash, and HTML5 all offer support for MP4 (there are some outliers). On top of that MP4 can use the H.264 video codec and the AAC audio codec, compatibility wise they are the best choices for compressing your video. H.264 video is supported by just about any player, browser, plugin and device available. It also offers one of the best algorithms for compressing your video on top of being freely available.

How Exactly Do You Encode For A Targeted Connection Speed?

File size is probably the first idea that pops in your head, but you shouldn't be thinking so much about the file size as the overall bitrate. As long as the viewer's connection can keep up with the file's bitrate, it will stream (progressive download or streaming) without stuttering.

File size = bitrate (kilobits per second) x duration

Bitrate is a measurement of the number of bits that are transmitted over a set length of time. Your overall bitrate is a combination of your video stream and audio stream in your file with the majority coming from your video stream.

A simplified analogy is to think about how water is pumped out of a well and how long it will take for water to travel from the well to a faucet. No matter how powerful the pump there will always be a delay because the water has to travel through the pipes connected to the faucet. Your video is the water, while the pump represent the speed of the Amazon s3 server. The connection speed of your end user is the diameter of the pipe. The length of the pipes can be thought as the distance from the server. The pipe is going to bottleneck the water increasing the time it will take to get out the other side. In essence, that is the major problem you face with the streaming of videos online, you have to account for the delay.

If you know the average connection speed of your clients you can set your overall bitrate to be under their download speed to achieve a streaming playback. You should encode at a bitrate below their connection speed because this will help to take into account miscellaneous ambient traffic, distance from the server, and other elements loading into the same webpage.

For example, taking the US broadband average of 3.9 Mbps (as of January 2010) you would probably want to encode somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 Kbps. (1 Megabit equals 1,000 Kilobits most encoders measure bitrate in Kilobits). What this means is that every second of the video there is 2,000 kilobits required before that second can be displayed. Converting bits to bytes (8 bits equals 1 byte) you can see this is 250 kilobytes a second or 15 megabytes per minute.

Depending on the codec in use and the container this can be a very limiting number. The problem is further extended if you have varying connection speeds across your user base, which is most often the case. If you are only serving one version of your video, you will find yourself pandering to the lowest common denominator. AT&T for example (In the US) guarantees only a download speed up to 1.5Mbps with their starting DSL package.

Cutting Back On The Video Stream

If you have your target bitrate, but are having trouble achieving an acceptable quality video, you will have to cut back in some aspect. The contributing factors that will lead to a higher video bitrate are the amount of pixels (the resolution of the video), the frame rate, and the amount of motion present. If your video is already filmed there is not much you can do about the motion in the video, but in your planning stages you can think ahead.

1. Resolution

The easiest change can come from lowering the number of pixels displayed by simply lowering the resolution of the file. If you are playing your video in a 320 x 240 player on your website and you do not expect the end user to enlarge the video, then there is no reason to have a file with a higher resolution. Even if your camera records at 1080p, it does not mean you cannot scale down to a smaller size to save on bitrate. Although, it should be noted that you want to maintain the image aspect ratio when resizing. Most videos are filmed in either 16:9 or 4:3, changing this ratio can lead to a squishing or stretching effect that is unsightly.

For better quality to bitrate ratio, also remember to keep your resolution in a value evenly divisible by 16, but do not alter a resolution to make it a multiple of 16 unless you over-crop, which will cause you to lose part of your image. Under-cropping or adding a black border around your image will decrease encoding efficiency. Scaling will just degrade the image.

2. Frame Rate

The frame rate is how many unique consecutive images are displayed per second in the video to give the illusion of movement. The human visual system does not see in terms of frames; it works with a continuous flow of light information. Basically this means that the rate at which a video has the appearance of judder (non-smooth motion) is different based on a person to person basis along with the colors (or color of light or actions) in the video.

Around 24 frames per second, the typical film rate which often gives a "cinematic feel," is where most video creators land and is also a point that most human eyes are fooled into perceiving motion. This is not a standard of course, if your video is a screen cast you can get to frame rates as low as 5fps. On the other hand, large shifts between a pure white or pure black screens can have a perceivable fault below 30fps and footage of video games can often require 60fps to maintain smoothness. Television standards such as PAL (common in Europe and some parts of Asia) uses 25fps, while NTSC standard (used in the US and Japan) uses 29.97fps. Generally you should never exceed the frame rate of the source video. Obviously, the best results will be achieved if the frame rate is kept the same as your original source.

Unfortunately, to lower the bitrate you may have to choose a lower frame rate. Like most of these settings it is best to play around with the encoding to find a setting that looks best for your video. In order to do that it is advisable to consider the amount of action on screen. "Talking head videos" (a tripod shot recording a person talking at the screen) for example does not require a high frame rate because the motion is most likely subdued. While a video of a skate boarder will require at least 24fps to maintain smoothness. When you lower your frame rate make sure to accomplish it in even increments (such as splitting the amount in half) to avoid de-syncing of the video and audio streams.

3. Constant versus Variable

One option you will notice when you go to encode your videos is a selection for VBR (Variable Bit Rate encoding) or CBR (Constant Bit Rate encoding). As a general rule VBR is for progressive or standard downloads and CBR is for use when using a streaming cloudfront.

VBR allows you to set a maximum and minimum bitrate. The compression algorithm then tries to efficiently compress the data dipping into the minimum bitrate when there is little to no motion on screen and spiking to the maximum defined rate when the motion is prevalent. This helps to give you a smaller overall file size, but the unpredictable spikes in bitrate can choke the playback of streaming videos.

CBR is used when a predictable flat bit rate is needed. The flat bitrate throughout the entire file comes at the price of efficiency for the codec. Usually resulting in a larger file, but smoother playback.

However these rules are not universal. Depending on your video you might want to use a VBR for a streaming playback if the spikes do not exceed your target user's connection speed. For example if there is only one high motion scene in a video, you will be wasting bandwidth on a constant bitrate throughout the entire file and may better serve your user's by using a variable bitrate. In any case try experimenting with the two settings to find what works best for your video.

4. Quality versus Streaming

If you are not sure what your target connection speed is and you are not shooting to stream your videos, but do not want an abundant amount of bandwidth cost from Amazon, one method that works really well in determining a good bitrate is the Kush Gauge. To find a decent bitrate simply multiply the target pixel count by the frame rate; then multiply the result by a factor of 1, 2 or 4, depending on the amount of motion in the video; and then multiply that result by 0.07 to get the bit rate in bps. Divide your result by 1,000 to get a kbps estimate or by 1,000,000 to get a Mbps estimate.

Kush gauge: pixel count x motion factor x 0.07 ÷ 1000 = bit rate in kbps
(frame width x height = pixel count) and motion factor is 1,2 or 4

Screencast example
For example if your video is a low motion 5fps screen cast in a 1280 x 720 frame size you would have a formula like this:

1280 x 720 = 921,600 pixel count 
5 frames per second 
1 = Low Motion 

(921,600 x 5) x 1 x 0.07 = 322,560 bps / 1000 = 322 kbps bitrate

High action video example
Another example on the other side of the spectrum would be a 24 fps high action shot of an action scene with multiple quick cuts in a 1920 x 1080 frame size:

1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600 pixel count 
24 frames per second 
4 = High Motion 

(2,073,600 x 24) x 4 x 0.07 = 13,934,592 bps / 1000 = 13,934 kbps bitrate

For streaming this example would be a bad idea, unless your target audience lives in South Korea. If you do decide to offer a super high quality file, be sure to also encode a lower quality streaming video for clients that may not have the fastest broadband available.

When using this gauge with a variable bitrate (VBR), 75% of the resulting bitrate can be used for the minimum rate and 150% for the maximum rate.

If you do not want to do the math this bitrate calculator will give you a similar result:

http://www.adobe.com/jp/devnet/flash/apps/flv_bitrate_calculator.html

5. Starting Points

If you are completely lost right now and having trouble deciding what your video bitrate should be here are some starting points for you to experiment with for a streaming connection:

In general though we recommend a bitrate of around 2 - 2.5 Mbps, which takes into account the average worldwide broadband connections. Once again we do however suggest you experiment with different settings and see how they work for you.

6. The Other Side of the Equation

Once you have your video bitrate defined, you will still have to decide how to set the encoding for your audio. Most of the settings are straight forward because they can be copied from your source file, but if your file is slightly above your targeted bitrate you can make some small cutbacks on the audio. Even at extremely low bit rates, reasonable audio quality can be achieved.

First you need to figure out if you are going to encode with Mono or Stereo. If your source video was filmed in mono there is no reason to encode in stereo. You can however reduce a stereo stream to mono and it is generally advisable if the video is a simple speech. Talking head videos are usually good candidates for selecting mono over stereo.

For your sampling frequency it is suggested that you maintain around 44.1 kHz for most of your videos or 22.05 kHZ if once again you are recording only a simple speech. Anything below 22.05 kHz will begin to degrade and distort low volume sounds such as breathing to the point where it is noticeable. While above 44.1 kHz is mainly for audio focused projects.

In the end you will probably be looking at 96 - 164kbps for a stereo music tracks, for the same track in mono, bit rates as low as 56 - 80kbps may still be acceptable. If you are once again dealing with speech only tracks you can probably even get comprehensible sound as low as 16 - 24 kbps.

Parting advice

Overall there is no set guideline as to what your video's compression should be. Do not expect to find a simple universal number to input. For every video this is a decision based on your client's connection speed and the quality you want to maintain for your file.