What is the best way to share a compressed video in Windows 10 mobile?

[Windows Central Question]

My wife has an online business and wants to be able to take videos on her phone and then quickly make them available online. She says that the direct sharing option to Facebook does not work for what she wants to do, so she needs to quickly get a video from her phone into a compressed format ready to share. She keeps complaining to me about how her phone (Lumia 950XL) sucks because if she tries to email a video to herself, the email screen literally just sits there spinning for an hour trying to send a 2 minute video. She said texting crashes. I showed her how to use OneDrive, which is the only option that seems to work for her, but even that kind of stinks from a use case perspective. I just uploaded a 51 second (130MB) video for her to OneDrive and it seemed like it took 10 minutes because of the size of the video. I can see what she's complaining about. String 3 of those together and you're waiting 30 minutes for 2.5 minutes of video. She needs to get a high quality compressed video ready for social media before uploading it somewhere. A good compression should be able to get 50 seconds of video into 10 MB or something like that. That would cut her upload times down by 10x. She swears up and down that she didn't have this problem (waiting forever to email/text/share videos) with the Lumia 1020 on Windows Phone 8.1.
Someone please help. I have no idea what to tell her. I'm not familiar enough with the apps available or social media to council her.

Thanks!

 

[Chintan Gohel]

My wife has an online business and wants to be able to take videos on her phone and then quickly make them available online. She says that the direct sharing option to Facebook does not work for what she wants to do, so she needs to quickly get a video from her phone into a compressed format ready to share. She keeps complaining to me about how her phone (Lumia 950XL) sucks because if she tries to email a video to herself, the email screen literally just sits there spinning for an hour trying to send a 2 minute video. She said texting crashes. I showed her how to use OneDrive, which is the only option that seems to work for her, but even that kind of stinks from a use case perspective. I just uploaded a 51 second (130MB) video for her to OneDrive and it seemed like it took 10 minutes because of the size of the video. I can see what she's complaining about. String 3 of those together and you're waiting 30 minutes for 2.5 minutes of video. She needs to get a high quality compressed video ready for social media before uploading it somewhere. A good compression should be able to get 50 seconds of video into 10 MB or something like that. That would cut her upload times down by 10x. She swears up and down that she didn't have this problem (waiting forever to email/text/share videos) with the Lumia 1020 on Windows Phone 8.1.
Someone please help. I have no idea what to tell her. I'm not familiar enough with the apps available or social media to council her.

Thanks!

one way to reduce the size of the video would be to record in a lower resolution like 1080p or 720p if the option is available in camera settings

Another would be to use an app called moviemaker which can reduce/compress videos which you then can upload to onedrive or email

 

[GodlikeNay]

Thanks for the response. I checked out the app and it seems to work pretty good for compression.
I could be wrong, but I think Windows Phone 8.1 used to compress things automatically. I'm pretty sure if you went to send a video through text, email, or social media, it sent a compressed version. Personally, I think that is a better option than what we have now in WM10. Either way, the all or nothing thing kind of stinks. With 8.1 I know there were times I wanted to send a high quality video to someone and what the recipient was getting was not what I wanted to send. On the flip side, now on WM10, it takes fooooooorrrrreeeeeeeeevvvvvvveeeeeeerrrrrrrr to share even a 50 second video... it's bad. It would be nice if they could figure out a nice hybrid. Send a compressed version by default unless you select to send high quality video.... from there, offer some standard formats of varying quality the user can select with one of them marked as "original", "full resolution", or something like that.

 

[Bleser]

I wanted to bump this thread to see if anyone has other ideas. I was excited for my wife's 735 to get upgraded to W10M soon but this past weekend I learned that W10M has zero automatic capability to compress email attachments (photos or videos). She frequently shares things over email or text and now it will be a ten-step process that I know will really be frustrating.

Does anyone know if this is in the works? Is automatic compression coming back as an added feature down the road?

 

[Avatar of Apathy]

I just found out today why it is a pain in the butt to send a video in text messages compared to my L925. WTF do they always go backwards with features? Now I have to use a 3rd party app to compress a video when the competition does it automatically? Nice.

 

[daimv]

I have in my 950 a 1280x720/24 fps option in the video recording settings in the camera. This should give you the smallest file sizes of the other options without having to compress additionally. (though you always have the option of an app like the one mentioned by Chintan Gohel).

Also you could try the app ProShot to record video with instead of the default camera. ProShot lets you record at 1280x720 at 24 fps too, but you can also set quality settings (you can choose Low Quality, High Quality, and Max). Choosing Low Quality should give you a small file size from the beginning.

About email, usually it is not such a good medium to send video. A lot of email servers have file size limits of 10 or 20 MB, and unless the video is very small it tents to exceed that. I guess texting might be a similar case. OneDrive should be fine, if you don't like it, some other options are Dropbox, Google Drive (via an app like GDrive), even manually connecting your phone to your PC, or via the microSD card. Though if the video is small enough (I'd recommend less than 10MB, maybe 20) email should be fine.

I don't remember Windows 8.1 automatically compressing emailed videos. What I do remember though is that when you wanted to send a video from your PC to the phone you got the option to compress it, but that is different and might still happen. But I might just not remember it. I'm not sure if Whatsapp, Line, etc compress video when you send it, though that is on the app, not the OS.

Also maybe it isn't such a bad thing to record in high quality and then use an app to make it ready for social media, because then you have the high quality one as a separate file which you can use for other stuff like further editing if you want, or maybe upload the higher quality version afterwards or somewhere else. Of course this depends on your use case which I don't know. Still, now you have some options.

You can always use WeTransfer / YouSendit or other similar solutions to send stuff and share via emal (these websites use their own servers to host your file but send the download link via email, everything is done through their website)

 

[Bleser]

Since posting back in March I've learned to share photos/videos in a more efficient way overall even if the steps that I have to take are a bit more complicated. Basically, I share everything I want to as a link from OneDrive. This way I'm just emailing URLs to photos and videos that are automatically scaled for my recipients' based on their bandwidth. More efficient overall.

 

[Joe920]

I learned that W10M has zero automatic capability to compress email attachments (photos or videos).

Yep, that still annoys me regularly. I end up sending my folks 12MB pictures, not ideal.. Crazy that this hasn't been fixed.

 

[daimv]

Yep, that still annoys me regularly. I end up sending my folks 12MB pictures, not ideal.. Crazy that this hasn't been fixed.

I just learned that "zero automatic capability" is not really true. And Outlook DOES rescale images if you want to. The thing is, when you add images, you have to add them within the body of the email, using "Insert -> Image " to add them. And then if you click it you can choose 3 options for size (small, fit (fits the size you choose graphically), and original). I tested it sending myself an email with a pic I took with the camera at 19 MP. I chose "small", and I got a tiny image that used almost no space. So it works. Just don't add them as a normal attachment.

As for videos, that is a different story.