Your Best Known Method (BKM) for Videos?

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

Dear videographers and anyone else who has dabbled with full screen videos in mobile apps.

I’m currently working with a client that needs to display full screen video on an array of Android and iOS devices.

We are encountering a conundrum.

  1. We want the videos to play universally (i.e. Not crash on low capability Android devices).
  2. We want the videos to look good.
  3. We want the video files to be small.

I know, … this is one of those, “Choose any two” kinds of scenarios.  However, I really need all three.

Current Solution

Our current solution is to provide two versions of each video (in the binary).

  • SD - Guaranteed to work on low-end android devices.
  • HD - Looks nice on uber devices like the iPad Pro.

The problem here is, the videos are huge, easily equating to half the size of the whole binary.

Ideally, we’d package one video that meets all our needs.

Your Experiences and Suggestions?

So, finally to the questions.

  1. If you’ve included full-screen videos in games/apps with these constraints, what were your best practices?
  • What encoding did you use?  MP4, MKV, other.
  • What resolution did you settle on?
  • What encoding settings did you use? Frame rate, quality settings, etc.
  • What tools did you use?
  1. Do you have any other advice or thoughts?  If so, please share.

Thanks in advance and I hope this question generates some thoughtful responses that will be helpful both to me and future readers.

-Ed

#2

encode with H.264 at best resolution you can get. then use a program to transcode to a lower resolution till the size is good for your needs and the quality is acceptable.

you can check this for that:

https://ffmpeg.org/

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.264

the video will be uploaded with the apk? or it will be downloaded later inside the app?

if it will be uploaded with the apk and size of the apk metters, you should upload different apks with different video resolutions to the different devices you want to target. if size of the apk is not a issue, just put 2 or 3 resolution video and upload them all. inside your app check resolution of the device and play the correspond video.

if you get a low resolution video don’t expect to look nice in an ipad pro. that’s not going to happen.

if you can download after the app is installed, you can check resolution of device, download optimize content for that device and after you will get an offline version without needing to download anything else anymore. just first time you run the app.

#3

encode with H.264 at best resolution you can get. then use a program to transcode to a lower resolution till the size is good for your needs and the quality is acceptable.

you can check this for that:

https://ffmpeg.org/

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.264

the video will be uploaded with the apk? or it will be downloaded later inside the app?

if it will be uploaded with the apk and size of the apk metters, you should upload different apks with different video resolutions to the different devices you want to target. if size of the apk is not a issue, just put 2 or 3 resolution video and upload them all. inside your app check resolution of the device and play the correspond video.

if you get a low resolution video don’t expect to look nice in an ipad pro. that’s not going to happen.

if you can download after the app is installed, you can check resolution of device, download optimize content for that device and after you will get an offline version without needing to download anything else anymore. just first time you run the app.