The Fastest Ways to Compress Videos on IPhone and Android
Smartphones are amazing video cameras: iPhone, Google Pixel and Galaxy do a great job of stabilizing 4K video with great detail and color quality. But these videos are huge in size. That’s fine if you want to watch videos on your phone (assuming you’re paying for cloud storage), but what if you need to send them to someone over the Internet or create a backup without filling up your entire hard drive? This is where video compression comes into play.
Using various apps and websites, you can compress a huge video into a relatively small size – and. if you do it right, you won’t lose much in quality and resolution. Here are the best ways to compress videos on iPhone and Android.
How to compress video on iPhone
You’ll find plenty of iPhone apps in the App Store that promise to compress videos. The Video Compress application does this reliably. The free version is good enough for most users and doesn’t limit too much what it allows before forcing you to shell out for the paid version.
It’s easy to use. Open the app, press the Plus button and select the video you want to compress. The app will provide you with a standard template that you can customize. By default, the app works hard by offering to reduce files to tiny sizes, but you can change the preset to 1080p and increase the bitrate.
Even these settings will result in a 90% reduction in your file size while maintaining Full HD video output. You can preview the video to make sure it looks normal, and once compressed, it will automatically appear in the Photos app.
How to compress video on Android
On the Android side, the many video compressors available can be confusing. There are apps filled with pop-up ads and last-minute paid upgrades. In our testing, we found the Panda app to be the sweet spot. Advertising is not intrusive, compression is fast and works well, and most importantly, the interface is quite user-friendly.
The app has good presets when it comes to compressing videos for emailing (less than 25MB) and setting them up for uploading to social networks like Facebook.
The workflow of the application is simple. Give the app access to all media and select the videos you want to compress. Click the “Next” button and choose a compression style. You can choose from preset options like email or Facebook, or if you want to really compress the file, you can choose a custom resolution. Then click the “Compress” button and your result will be saved automatically.
How to compress a video using a website
If the video is on your computer or you don’t want to download any applications, you can use the video conversion website. Clideo is a reliable video conversion site that encrypts your video so no one can access your personal data.
The free plan lets you compress videos up to 500MB in size. Click the Upload File button, select a video, and let the website do the rest. Since the compression happens on the server side, you will have to wait a couple of minutes until the resulting file appears. Once compression is complete, click the Download button.