One of the problems that you can encounter when you are storing family videos is the fact that they simply take up too much space. In general videos tend to have large file sizes that can certainly add up when you’re storing hundreds or even thousands of videos.
Not only will this start to fill up your storage, but if you’re using cloud storage it could even translate to more money spent. Needless to say it is important you do something about it, and compressing your family videos is your best option.
Don’t Compromise the Quality
The challenging part about compressing family videos to store them is that you won’t want the quality of the videos to be compromised. That makes it tricky, as one of the ways that videos can be compressed is by reducing the video bitrate – but that can affect the quality and result in compression artifacts.
Because of that your best option to compress family videos it to transcode it to a codec with good compression. If you do that the video quality should be unaffected, and the file size could be significantly smaller – though it will depend on the codec you use, as well as the original codec the video was in.
As a rule it is best to select a codec and then transcode all your videos to it. In particular there are two options you could consider:
- H.264 is the ‘safe’ choice for videos due to how widely-supported it is, and it provides decent compression as well. However many of your videos are likely already using it, so you may not be able to reduce their file size.
- HEVC (H.265) can provide better compression than H.264, and may even be able to reduce the file size of videos encoded in it by up to half. However it is not as widely supported, and you may have difficulty watching your videos on some devices or platforms once they’re converted.
Make no mistake there are other formats that can match HEVC in terms of compression – but support for them varies as well. Considering support for HEVC is increasing (albeit slowly) it makes sense to prefer it over other formats that may be similar.
Of course if you want to be safe or if you want your video to be able to be watched by all your family members without any difficulty: H2.4 is the option you should look at.
Conclusion
Regardless of the format that you choose, you can then convert the video accordingly. That will require the use of a video converter, and some of the other features they provide can be useful – such as to convert FLV to MP3 and extract audio tracks from videos.
By reducing the file size of your videos in this way, you should be able to store them – without worrying that their quality will be affected. That in turn will let you save quite a bit in terms of the cost of storage – both on the cloud, as well as by buying external storage options.