When it comes to video files, higher-quality videos are much larger in size than lower-quality ones. Uploading and hosting these high-quality videos becomes a challenge due to several bandwidth constraints and the high upload time. And when your viewers watch these videos, if they're not on a high-speed connection, the video keeps buffering at their end, resulting in an unpleasant viewing experience.
What should you do in this case? To maintain a reasonable quality for your video and enable easy access over the internet, the best solution is to compress your video files. Yes, your resulting files may not be of the highest resolution, but they will be faster and easier to access while still being of acceptable quality.
What Exactly is Video Compression?
Video compression is a technique that reduces the overall size of a video file by removing non-functional and redundant data from the original file -- the video file format changes once it's compressed, based on the algorithm used for compression. You must either change the format of the reduced file or choose a player that's compatible with the new format.
Video compression results in some quality loss. But how much? That depends on the tool that you use for compression. If you don't want to compromise on the quality at any cost, you can opt for making the video shorter or removing audio from it instead of compression. But if that's not an option, compression is your best bet.
Best Tools for Video Compression with No Quality Loss
It's possible to maintain almost the same quality as your original file with the right tools. Let's look at some of these tools that can help you obtain a smaller file without compromising on quality.
Shotcut
You can edit your videos with Shotcut without shelling out the big bucks. It's free and extremely convenient to use. You can upload your videos and choose what output format you want for the compressed video. Of course, the final quality of the resultant file will depend on the chosen format.
You can play around with these file formats, the resolution, and the aspect ratio until you get the desired quality of the smaller file.
VLC
VLC is one of the top choices when it comes to compressing videos. First, you can go to Media --> Convert and add the file/files you want to compress. Then, you can choose your preferred type of conversion. The best part about compressing in VLC is that it allows you to compress for a particular platform your user might view the videos on. This makes it easy for you to choose your compression algorithm depending on your end-users.
VLC is not only great for editing but also for viewing. Once you have your smaller file, you can verify its quality by playing it in VLC.
VideoSmaller
VideoSmaller is very convenient to use, as you don't need to download it on your system instead of the tools mentioned above. You can go to VideoSmaller.com and compress your video on the cloud. You can tweak files as large as 500MB on the online platform in various formats such as MP4, MOV, AVI, and MPEG.
In addition to making your file smaller, VideoSmaller also allows you to make other changes to your video files. For example, you can also choose to eliminate all audio from your file if that's unnecessarily adding to the file size.
Finding the Optimal File Size
When you're hosting your own videos, you must find the right file sizes to upload, maintaining a balance of resolution and bandwidth requirements. If you're uploading to an existing OTT platform, you can check their guidelines to decide what quality videos you want to upload. If you're hosting on your own OTT platform, you have more freedom to experiment and host videos to your liking.
If you're looking to create your own OTT platform, MAZ Systems is here to help. Contact us today.
