TikTok ad bitrate window: 0.516 to 6.67 Mbps for 10 minutes

The short answer

A 10-minute non-Spark TikTok ad has to average at least 516 kbps and finish at or under 500 MB, so its average bitrate must sit between 0.516 Mbps and about 6.67 Mbps. That follows from two lines on TikTok's own video ads specification page: bitrate "more than or equal to 516 kbps" and file size "less than or equal to 500 MB", with a duration of up to 10 minutes. TikTok's page does not say whether MB means 1,000,000 or 1,048,576 bytes, so the figures below use decimal megabytes and leave a margin.

Most ad uploads are nowhere near these limits. The arithmetic matters in two cases: a long screen recording that an editor exported at a very high bitrate, and a heavily compressed export that falls under the floor. Both fail on the same page of rules, in opposite directions.

The arithmetic

File size in megabytes is bitrate in megabits per second times seconds, divided by 8. The floor column below multiplies 516 kbps by the duration. The ceiling column divides 500 MB (4,000 megabits) by the duration, which gives the highest average bitrate that still fits.

What this means for a 10-minute ad

Only the 10-minute row is tight. A 1080p export at 8 Mbps would be 8 x 600 / 8 = 600 MB, which is over the cap, while the same file at 5 Mbps is 375 MB and passes. A 60-second ad can be encoded at almost any bitrate an editor offers and still be under 500 MB.

The floor is the quieter failure. A talking-head clip with a flat background can compress to a very small file, and an aggressive export preset can land under 516 kbps on average. If your delivery tool reports a bitrate, read it before upload instead of trusting the preset name.

Where Sume fits

Sume does not expose a bitrate field. Video trim and Timeline 1.0 compile ffmpeg on the server, reject codec and crf keys from the client, and return a new MP4 whose size you then check yourself. What you control is duration and geometry, which decide the size indirectly.

The documented limits help you stay in range. A trim output is at most 900 seconds, a Timeline render at most 1,800 seconds, and a TikTok ad at most 600 seconds, so a 10-minute cut is one trim call at the public rate of $0.02 per job. Trim with precision: exact re-encodes with libx264 and yuv420p, and the default keyframe mode stream-copies, so the bitrate of a copied cut is the bitrate of the source.

• Trim a 25-minute recording to 600 seconds: one video-trim job, $0.02 (per the docs page, read 2026-10-09).
• Render a 10-minute Timeline: ceil(10) x $0.10 = $1.00 (public rate, check GET /v1/catalog).
• Probe the result with video inspect for duration and audio presence, then check file size in your own tooling.

A pre-upload checklist

Check duration is 600 seconds or less, size is 500 MB or less, and the average bitrate is 516 kbps or more. Check the container is one of the five TikTok lists for non-Spark ads (.mp4, .mov, .mpeg, .3gp, .avi). Spark Ads are a different rule set: TikTok lists .mp4 or .mov and no duration restriction.