I wanted to post a few videos, and a 51 second video was 160 megs. The only easy way from mobile to reduce the video size was to share it to another app that automatically reduces it down to five megs. Lots lost, and that sort of degradation.
I don’t need the full HD quality for videos posted, in fact for proof of ownership reason sometimes it’s nice to have a slightly lossy version, but might there be an app or other way to reduce it to a target sizethat fits for microblog?
I’m sure FFMPeg can do that at command line, but that isn’t very friendly from tablet or mobile, and for some users that would be a considerable barrier too easy uploads
The goal being if the limit is 75 megs someway to be able to hit the upload maximum with the greatest quality possible.
Looks like I can use handbrake for OSX, and is a little more straightforward than remembering all the flags of FFMPEG – but need an iOS way to retain quality and still get video under 75mb.
In a previous version of the Micro.blog iOS app, we tried to scale the video down automatically to help get it under the file size restriction. I’d like to add something like that again so that this works without any extra manual processing on the video.
It also might be time for us to bump up the limit again. Or come up with something special for longer videos for Micro.blog Premium subscribers.
As for your question about FFMPEG… That is very flexible, but also I recommend giving QuickTime Player export a try. It’s not as configurable but you might be able to export as 480p and get it much smaller.
If you want something that feels native and works on both macOS and iOS, setting up a shortcut might be a good alternative. You can create your own or use a ready made one, I just grabbed the first result when I searched apple shortcut resize video. I tested it on a 30-second video of mine, and it went from 130.4 MB to 38.7 MB.
I’d like to piggyback on this issue by asking that you place a little text next to the update button that states what the limit is for different types of media.
I had forgotten and spent 2 minutes trying to upload a file. No error message, just a progress bar that never completed.