In one embodiment of the present invention, an encoding bitrate ladder selector tailors bitrate ladders to the complexity of source data. Upon receiving source data, a complexity analyzer configures an encoder to repeatedly encode the source data-setting a constant quantization parameter to a different value for each encode. The complexity analyzer processes the encoding results to determine an equation that relates a visual quality metric to an encoding bitrate. The bucketing unit solves this equation to estimate a bucketing bitrate at a predetermined value of the visual quality metric. Based on the bucketing bitrate, the bucketing unit assigns the source data to a complexity bucket having an associated, predetermined bitrate ladder. Advantageously, sagaciously selecting the bitrate ladder enables encoding that optimally reflects tradeoffs between quality and resources (e.g., storage and bandwidth) across a variety of source data types instead of a single, “typical” source data type.