What is a bitrate ladder?
A bitrate ladder is the set of quality levels — resolution and bitrate pairs — that a video is encoded into for adaptive streaming. A typical ladder runs from 240p at a few hundred kbps up to 1080p at several Mbps. The player climbs and descends this ladder to match each viewer's bandwidth.
What's on a rung
Each rung is a resolution plus a target bitrate — for example 360p at 800kbps, 720p at 2.5Mbps, 1080p at 5Mbps. More rungs mean smoother adaptation but more encoding and storage; too few means visible quality jumps as the player switches.
Fixed vs per-title ladders
A fixed ladder uses the same rungs for every video. A per-title (content-aware) ladder tunes the rungs to the footage — a screen recording needs far less bitrate than fast-moving sports — saving bytes without losing quality. This is where free encoding matters: if generating extra renditions is billed per minute, a richer ladder costs more.
The ffmpeg version
Rolling your own means an ffmpeg command per rung, a packager to segment the output and write the HLS/DASH manifests, and a plan to store and invalidate it all — which is most of what a managed encoder does for you.
How rehelios handles it
rehelios builds the adaptive ladder for every upload with free encoding, so you get a full range of renditions without a per-minute transcoding charge — and without maintaining an ffmpeg pipeline.