Question Why do videos taken on my Huawei P10 Plus take up so much space?

[splinternet]

As per the title. Example: a 20-second video takes up 50MB. The same video taken with my Samsung Galaxy S9 takes up just 4MB. Both formats are MP4

 

[B. Diddy]

It almost certainly has to do with the video format, resolution, and/or FPS that you're using. How do those compare for both of the phones?

 

[splinternet]

On the P10 the setting is [16:9] 1080p (30 fps), encoding H.264

On the S9, the setting is 16:9 FHD 1920x1080 (30 fps), HEVC off (no mention of encoding)

 

[splinternet]

Hello - can does anyone have any comment re: my last post?

 

[B. Diddy]

On the P10 the setting is [16:9] 1080p (30 fps), encoding H.264

On the S9, the setting is 16:9 FHD 1920x1080 (30 fps), HEVC off (no mention of encoding)

For the video on the S9, are you looking at the Camera app settings, or the file details associated with the video in question?

 

[splinternet]

In both phones, I went into the camera app, selected 'video', then 'settings'.

 

[B. Diddy]

Ok, that's what the camera app is doing right now. But I'm talking about the video files in question -- are you able to see what format was used when they were taken? Use a file manager app to look at the details of each video file to see if it says there.

Or are you saying that when you take a test video with those current settings, the files still differ that much in size?

 

[splinternet]

I've never meddled with the video settings in either phone, so these are the settings used on the respective phones. File manager shows both phones' videos are 1920x1080

 

[B. Diddy]

I can't figure out from doing a web search -- does the P10 Plus take HDR video?

 

[splinternet]

Here's a screenshot of the video settings, there's no clue about HDR

 

[B. Diddy]

I'm not sure what's causing the discrepancy. Just as a further test, can you try taking the videos again with both phones using the exact same settings, and making sure the S9's HEVC toggle is still off? I'm still wondering if the S9 video you're looking at might have been taken in HEVC without you being aware of it.

 

[splinternet]

I've just recorded an identical 20-second video on each phone. The S9 (with HEVC off) stores this in 4MB. The P10 takes up 44MB. I don't know whether it's a clue but there's an 'info' button on the P10 and when pressed it shows some sort of graph which to my untrained eye shows a lot of activity in the first few seconds - perhaps translating into a lot of storage?....



The S9 doesn't have a similar facility.

 

[B. Diddy]

Ok, something must be wonky with the S9. I did the following on my Galaxy A32 5G (which should have similar camera software as the S9):

1. 20 second video at FHD (1920x1080) 30 fps, HEVC off, file is 46.07 MB.
2. 20 second video at FHD 30 fps, HEVC on, file is 27.03 MB.
3. 20 second video at HD (720p) 30 fps, HEVC on, file is 19.08 MB.

Unless there's some other compression going on, I don't see how a 20 second FHD video can be only 4 MB in size -- that's the size of just one fairly detailed photo. Can you show the information about that video on the S9?

 

[splinternet]

Although the S9 video only takes up 4MB on my Windows pc, I've discovered that on the S9 itself it's taking up 35.46MB...



I've been using WhatsApp to send it to my PC (which is where I do all my work), so it seems that WhatsApp does a 10:1 compression.

I've not tried this before with the P10 video - I've been simply connecting this to my PC via USB and doing a file transfer. But when I use WhatsApp on this too, it ends up compressed to 3.6MB.

So it seems clear that WhatsApp performs roughly 10:1 compression on video files.

 

[B. Diddy]

Although the S9 video only takes up 4MB on my Windows pc, I've discovered that on the S9 itself it's taking up 35.46MB...

View attachment 361159

I've been using WhatsApp to send it to my PC (which is where I do all my work), so it seems that WhatsApp does a 10:1 compression.

I've not tried this before with the P10 video - I've been simply connecting this to my PC via USB and doing a file transfer. But when I use WhatsApp on this too, it ends up compressed to 3.6MB.

So it seems clear that WhatsApp performs roughly 10:1 compression on video files.

Aha! Yes, it seems that WhatsApp automatically compresses videos to SD quality (480p), which would explain a lot: https://9to5mac.com/2023/08/24/whatsapp-hd-videos/. It looks like you can now choose to send videos in HD now, but I wonder if there might still be a little compression involved with that.