One of the elements that take up the majority of space on a mobile phone are videos, which easily exceed hundreds of megabytes up to a terabyte if you get lost. This can take up most of the space on your phone and is also not optimal. if you want to send them to other peopleas it will use a lot of bandwidth and take longer to send.
One way to solve the problem is compress videos. In exchange for losing some quality and perhaps lowering the resolution, the size of your videos can be reduced considerably. We will see how you can do it in the three main modes available on an Android mobile.
Lower quality when recording
Compressing videos is a process that requires a lot of power and time, so if you record a lot of videos it may be more optimal for you. record them at lower quality, as long as you are satisfied with the result. You save time, although you lose quality and you won’t be able to change your mind later to recover the original quality of the videos.
Each mobile includes its own options and configurations, although it is quite common for Android phones to allow you to choose at least resolution in video recording (in the camera app settings). The lower the resolution, the smaller the size of the resulting video.
Some phones may include some additional options, such as choosing the number of frames per second (the more, the more the video takes up) or the encoding. Some codecs compress better than others, although generally the default settings will already be optimal.
Compress when sharing on WhatsApp and similar
If you are thinking about compressing videos to share them on social networks or messaging applications, the good news is that the vast majority of applications they lower the quality of the videos automatically when you send them to other people or share them.
This is more evident in some applications than others. For example, in WhatsApp you are told the size of the videos before sending them, at the top of the screen. The same thing happens on Telegram, with the advantage that you can also choose compression level with four levels depending on whether you prefer better quality or a smaller size.
In other applications, you depend on the default settings. For example, in the Facebook application options you can choose whether you want to upload videos in standard or HD quality. It is necessary to emphasize that in these cases the video is maintained at its original quality on your mobile, and it is the copy that is sent or uploaded that is compressed to a smaller size.
Use applications to compress videos
If you want to have more control over video compression, then you will need an application to help you, as it is not very common for it to come pre-installed on the system. You will find hundreds and hundreds on Google Play: we recommend Panda Video Compressor because it is free, works well and doesn’t add any watermark in the videos.
Panda Video Compressor: Movie & Video Resizer
Whether you use Panda or any other alternative, the process should be similar. You open the application, choose the video or videos you want to compress and then you choose the compression level. In the case of Panda, you have several options out of the box, such as “small file”, “medium quality” or “for email”, in addition to being able to choose custom settings yourself.
An advantage of Panda is that, after compressing the video, it shows you a summary comparing the original and compressed videowhere you can see not only the difference in size, but play each one so you can check if the quality of the compressed video is good.
Another addition of interest for those whose mobile phone has almost no free space is that the application has the useful replace option. That is to say, replaces the original video with the compressed one (if you choose), which will help you free up a lot of valuable space on your phone.