Compressing videos on Android

Your default camera settings are working against you 🐘.

You just recorded a video of you performing one hundred burpees on your phone and you’re about to submit to us as proof-of-work.

The problem is that your phone wrongly assumes that you always want the best resolution and the highest picture quality… That short burpee-video turns out to be 250MB in size.

If you were to try uploading the video, you’d be staring at spinner for a few minutes. In fact, HostageFund doesn’t even accept submissions where the file is larger 100MB.

The real solution:

HostageFund will be releasing a native Android app soon that will compress your media on your device before sending the upload.

l be releasing a native Android app soon that will compress your media on your device before sending the upload.

In non-geek-speak, that means that you won’t need to worry about camera settings and file sizes when that happens. Future-magical-app doesn’t exist yet though, so what do we do in the meantime?

The short-term solution:

You can easily compress the videos on your phone with an app called VideoPanda. They have a free version with ads, or a paid one without them.

It’s a two click process from there. Select you file, choose the Small setting and hit next until it allows you to download the compressed version.