Bitrate
A megabit is a unit of digital information storage, abbreviated Mbit (or Mb).
1 megabit = 1,000,000 bits which is equal to 125,000 bytes. In kilobytes this is either 125 kB (decimal meaning) or about 122 kB (122 KiB) (binary meaning). The megabit is most commonly used when referring to data transfer rates in network speeds, e.g. a 100 Mbit/s (megabit per second) Fast Ethernet connection. In this context, like elsewhere in telecommunications, it always equals a million bits. Residential high speed Internet access is often advertised incorrectly in megabits (a unit of information) rather than megabit per second.
Video streams are often referred to as being "N megabit" streams (which means N Mbit / second). Novice users often confuse Megabits and Megabytes. The conversion factor is that there are 8 Megabits in 1 Megabyte - (so divide Mb/sec by 8 to get MB/sec).
Here are some helpful numbers:
| Source | Mb/Sec | MB/sec | MB/hour | GB/hour | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DVD (max peak bitrate) | 10.08 | 1.26 | 4536 | 4.43 | |
| HD-PVR Recording (adjustable settings) | 13.5 | 1.6875 | 6075 | 5.93 | |
| HD Recording (ATSC) (max bitrate) | 19.4 | 2.425 | 8730 | 8.53 |
Conversions between Mb/sec to MB/sec - Google is your friend
One of the easiest ways to perform megabit to megabyte conversion (aside from dividing by 8) - is to go to enter a query on google with the terms "X Mb/sec to MB/sec" (replace X with the megabit value you wish to convert). You may also perform conversions to binary units ("X Mb/sec to mebibytes/sec") or even to binary units per hour ("X Mb/sec to gibibytes/sec"). Note that Google doesn't seem to recognize the binary abbreviations (kiB, MiB, GiB, etc.).
