You’ve probably been in situations where you needed to share or back up great videos online. Maybe a movie clip, a comedy sketch or your baby’s first step.
A Google Play Store search for video compression apps will show dozens of results. Some of the apps come as advertised, but a large portion of them can be a complete waste of time.
Whether you need to compress your videos for sharing online or to free up space on your device, we’ve put together some of the most reliable video compression apps for Android.
What makes a good video compression app?
When you want to compress a video, you have one main goal – to reduce the size of the video as much as possible. But is that all there is to a good video compression app? Absolutely not.
In addition to reducing file size, a good compression app should be able to preserve as much of a video’s original quality as possible. This should also be achieved in as short a time as possible. Quality is very important. What is the point of compressing large video files if the resulting videos are going to be a pain in the eye?
Here is our selection of the most reliable video compression apps you can choose from on Android.
1. VidCompact
With millions of downloads and a 4.6-star rating in the Google Play Store, VidCompact is both popular and highly rated. It has an intuitive user interface. When you launch the app, you’ll find a large “Trim and Compress” button to kickstart the compression process.
It has a batch compression option as well as a lossless compression feature, but both are slammed behind a payment wall. The lossless compression promises compressed videos that preserve their image quality and resolution. When tested, it gave a good video quality, but it was not completely lossless as promised.
How does it hold up in a test?
We tried to compress a 58 MB video with a duration of 4 minutes and 41 seconds. The test was performed on a 4GB RAM Android smartphone running Android 10.
The video was compressed to 27 MB with a compression time of 4 minutes. The video resolution was downgraded to 848×480 pixels from the original 1280×720 resolution. The resulting video had a good quality and the difference was not visible on an average mobile phone screen.
Advantage
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Good image quality at 53% compression
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Intuitive user interface
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Possibility of batch compression
Disadvantages
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Some key features are only available under a paid subscription
Fetch: VidCompact (free, subscription available)
2. Video compression
Unlike some apps on our list, Video Compress is primarily built for video compression rather than video editing in general. When you launch the app, you get a list of all the videos on your device. All you have to do is select one and press Compress video to begin.
The user interface is attractive and intuitive. It is one of the best on our list on all measurements. You have the option to downgrade the image quality a bit, but at the same time preserve your original resolution, or downgrade the resolution and stick to the original image quality as much as possible.
With Video Compress you can determine the exact video resolution you want your video without being limited to a list of preset resolutions. That’s not all, you can also tamper with the bit rate of your video to reduce the resulting file size even more.
How does it hold up in a test?
We tested the same video on the same device and it produced a 24 MB video with a resolution of 853×480 pixels. That’s about 58% compression. The resulting video did not appear distorted on an average mobile screen despite the level of compression.
If you choose slightly lower image quality at the same resolution, the final video will frame around 16 MB. If you mess with the bitrate feature, you can get it down to 13MB. All compression regardless of quality took about 4 minutes to complete.
Advantage
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Lots of preset resolutions
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Possibility to provide a custom target resolution
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You can tamper with the video bit rate for even better compression
Disadvantages
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You need to stay in the app until the compression is complete for longer videos – minimization can cause the process to fail.
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No batch compression function
Fetch: VideoCompress (free)
3. Panda Resizer Video Compressor
Another great option on our list is the Panda Resizer. It has an easy-to-navigate user interface that makes it very easy to find the video files you want to compress.
The app offers a lot of preset resolutions and an option to provide a custom target resolution for compressed videos. Unlike others on this list, there are no other smart extra features. It’s all video compression and nothing more.
How does it hold up in a test?
Using the same video and the same device, the Video Compressor Panda Resizer produced a 26MB video with a resolution of 853×480 pixels. On mobile screens, the resulting image quality is commendable and resembles the original video.
Advantage
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Possibility of batch compression
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Easy to navigate
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A lot of preset resolutions and an option to provide custom target resolution
Disadvantages
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Slightly exceeded the 4-minute compression time that other apps achieved
Fetch: Video Compress Panda Resizer (free, subscription available)
4. YouCut
YouCut is an Android video editing app that acts as a video compression tool. It has a beautiful interface, though not very intuitive. Since its primary purpose is not video compression, you will find fewer compression tools and more editing tools. If you are looking for Android apps to reduce the image size, YouCut can do that too.
If you’re into video editing on Android, you’ll find comfort with YouCut’s compression tool. This will help keep the final size of edited videos as low as possible. If you want to compress a random video on your device, YouCut may not be the best option. But it does the job anyway.
How does it hold up in a test?
YouCut could not compress the test video with a target resolution of 853×480 pixels. Although it can produce videos with significantly higher resolutions, it just did not work with our test video. This does not appear to be a device-specific issue, as similar issues occurred on two other devices.
For the test video, YouCut could only achieve a resolution of 568×320 with a file size of 20MB.
Advantage
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Works great with videos edited in the app
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High quality results
Disadvantages
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Intrusive ads on the free version
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The paid version does not offer any significant upgrade of the compression functionality
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Does not hold up well against competitors
Fetch: YouCut (free, subscription available)
5. Video.Guru VideoMaker
Like YouCut, Video.Guru VideoMaker is not explicitly a video compression app. It is a popular video creation tool that offers a video compression feature. As expected, since video compression is not its primary function, navigating to the right tool is not straightforward. It has a nice interface and if you are into video editing you will find its compression tool very useful.
It is also among popular apps for adding special effects to videos. So you can also take advantage of the feature if you want to add effects to compressed videos.
How does it hold up in a test?
Unlike YouCut, Video.Guru can produce a 480p result from the test video. However, there is a plot twist. The resulting video is almost twice the size of the original. It seems that the app got the whole idea of compression completely wrong on this occasion. Nevertheless, it did a good job of compressing other high quality videos and is definitely worth being on the list.
After downgrading to a resolution of 568×320 for our test video, the result was a 28MB file with an image quality that is a delight to the eyes.
Advantage
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Works great when editing videos
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High quality results
Disadvantages
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Leaving the app when there is active compression may cause it to stop
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Sometimes intrusive video ads come up in the free version
Fetch: Video.Guru Video Maker (free, subscription available)
Your device may affect performance
Video compression is a resource-intensive process. The speed and in some cases the quality of the results you get can be significantly affected by the processing power of your phone. If you want a smoother compression experience, especially when compressing long-lasting videos in large sizes, consider using advanced devices.
Once you have compressed your video collection on your phone, you can take a look at our list of the best free video players so you have something to watch them on.
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