From the article it sounded like they were doing reviews, not let’s plays. Reviews are inherently and substantially more transformative. They’re not merely appending the content as it is played. They’re supporting their assessments and reasoning with footage and proof.
Streaming can provide decent quality, but not high quality. That’s simply too costly on scale.
Bit rate alone doesn’t necessarily tell you quality either.
I suggest you look for downloads and look for
To assess encoding information, you look at file type, video codec, and encoding bit-ness.
From high to low compatibility, and low to high compression ratio:
You can consider the triplets of the codec to be different names for the same thing.
You’ll be able to play all file and codec types on a PC, but not necessarily on other devices. If you’re streaming from PC to something else, that’s fine too.
I’m usually looking for 10-bit HEVC releases because of their vastly superior size for quality. If that’s not available, HEVC or AVC. In most cases, it doesn’t matter too much to me.
A video with a lot of movement or visual detail will have bigger sizes.
If you compare an AVC release and bitrate with a HEVC 10-bit release and bitrate, they are vastly different. You can get the same quality for a fraction of file size and bitrate. More bitrate is often a waste of bandwidth and storage space.