How to convert or compress videos on Android (Video converter app for Android )?

Have you ever needed to send a video you took with your phone to your friends or family members on WhatApp or upload it on Facebook and realized the file size is too big? I'm sure you have faced such a situation. Let's explore how to compress videos on Android phone to reduce the file size so we can share without incurring huge data charges. 

Most modern smartphone have good cameras, which means higher megapixels, which in turn means the videos/pictures are of higher file sizes. Bigger video files
will incur more data charges if you are sending with your data connection on your phone. And so will the receiver, if he/she is using mobile data connection. 

Some ways to lower the video file size on your phone (without installing any software)

Most smartphones will have an opinion to change the resolution of photos and videos from the camera settings. If you are shooting a not-so-important video for sharing, you may explore your camera settings to choose a smaller resolution to reduce file size. 

• Explore camera settings to choose smaller photo or video resolution
• Some common resolutions in mobile cameras:
• QVGA: 320 x 240
• VGA: 640 x 480
• High Definition Video: 1280 x 720 

Check out more video resolutions here.

How to compress video files in Android Phone? 

While you can lower the size of videos from your mobile camera by choosing a smaller resolution as discussed above, it is not ideal to do so all the time. Because when we are taking the video, generally the purpose is to keep the video for viewing later, not necessarily only for sharing only.  And the better the video quality, the more fun it is to watch them,  especially on bigger screens. So we'd prefer to keep higher resolution settings most of the time. 

Higher resolutions set on mobile camera will create better videos with higher file size. Is storage a problem? Nowadays, even phones have decent storage capacities as storage is cheap. So file sizes aren't such a big issue. And if required, we can also backup on our computers and external hard drives and delete from our mobile phones.

Useful Android apps to compress or convert videos:

Video Converter Android 2 

I have personally tried several Android apps to compress and convert videos on Android phone. But I did not explore further after I installed "Video Converter Android 2". This app stands out. It does the job very well. For presets and some file formats, you need to upgrade to premium version (Rs.199 only as of January 2016). If you know a bit of settings to apply yourself manually, basic is good enough to reduce video file sizes. 

 

 

I have prepared a small demonstration video how to compress video files on Android Smartphone. The app covered in "Video Compress", which is available on Google Play to download.




How to install Video Converter Android 2 ?

• Download and install Video Converter Android 2 from Google Play

• Open the app and tap on the video you want to edit
• Press the App's icon to convert
• Profile: Manual
• Some settings you would need to apply to compress manually using this app are indicated in the picture below: 
• Container: output video file format
• FPS: Frames per second: if too low, your side will look like page flips 20 to 30 fps is good
• Res: Select resolution desired
• And other settings such as codec, bitrate, audio settings etc.
• Convert
   

In the screenshot on the left, you can see a 62MB video of resolution 1280x720 (HD) converted to 10MB with resolution of 640x480 (VGA).

Key features (as listed on the app's Google Play page):
-convert from many commonly used video formats to video files playable by Android default player (default profile)
-convert to mp4, h.264, avi, mpg, flv, wmv, mov, mkv, asf, m2ts from most commonly used video formats
-reduce video file size to send out through SMS etc (reduce size profile, premium only)
-convert video while keep original video quality (keep quality profile, premium only)
-manual mode to specify video bitrate, arbitrary resolution, audio bitrate, codec etc.
-extract audio from videos, convert mp4 to mp3 or other video formats to mp2, wav/pcm, mp3, aac, wma (audio only profile)
-rotate audio in arbitrary angle (rotate profile)
-remove audio from videos (video only profile)
-convert audio files to mp4/m4a/aac, mp3, mp2, pcm/wav etc (audio only profile)
-convert animated gif to video

Was this post helpful? If you know about other Android apps to compress video, do share in the comments below.