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Powerful Video Compression Made Easy!

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Adding video handling to a mobile app can be painful. Thankfully, Onymos has developed a powerful, on-board video compression component.

In a previous blog post, I discussed how a reliable, robust, and efficient image-compression service could make high-resolution images more lightweight and, therefore, suitable for apps where user engagement is key. But what about videos?

Recent research tells us videos are an even more essential media type for user engagement. Take a walk around the web and, you’ll see most brands looking to educate and convert visitors feature videos prominently on their home and product pages. Demonstrating a product in a video can add considerable value, particularly for people who don’t enjoy reading long web pages. And, it doesn’t hurt that search engines assign extra merit to videos as it indexes and websites and presents results.

For apps, we’re primarily focused on user engagement — and video scores well here. There’s been a lot said about the so-called video generation, and mobile app developers should undoubtedly factor that into their design philosophy. Video as a content category is very popular on social media, and it can drive engagement for a variety of reasons:

  1. It takes up a lot of space on the screen – more than a text link or a picture – so it’s inherently eye-catching
  2. People love sharing videos because they’re so experiential
  3. And, let’s not forget that shooting video on today’s smartphones is as easy as taking a photo

But… videos are big! Like, gigabytes big!

So, we took a look at existing video-compression techniques to see if we could improve on the state of the art of video encoding to make videos easier to transmit over cellular connections. The current compression technologies available to developers of hybrid mobile apps limit them to fixed presets of high-, medium- or low-quality compression. In most cases, the high-quality preset results in quality that’s perhaps too good, and of course, a much larger media size. The medium-quality preset is too low a quality for serious engagement uses. And low quality? Well, let’s say it’s fine for thumbnails.

The Onymos Media component that we developed solves this issue with patent-pending variable compression technology for both photos and videos on mobile devices. An app developer can now provide a number from 1-100, and the resulting video returned by Onymos Media component is that percent of its original size.

And best of all, quality is awesome! Here’s what some of our customers have said:

“The most amazing aspect is the video compression. 5% of original file size, and I cannot tell the quality difference.”

“I thought the compression was broken and the original large file was returned. The quality is that amazing, at 20% of the size!”

Video Compression is available as part of the Media Component in the Onymos Fabric, and offers innovative options and features to use in your mobile app. Learn more in the Media API reference page.

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