How to reduce the file size of screen recordings on smartphones from Xiaomi, Oppo, Realme, OnePlus, Samsung, Apple and others

Screen recording on modern smartphones is a quite useful feature. You can take a picture (screenshot) or record a video on your phone’s screen. These videos or photos can be later viewed, edited, and shared. However, if you record a one minute-plus video on your smartphone’s screen, it will consume decent storage space. For instance, on our Samsung Galaxy S21 a two-minute screen recording created a 100MB file. Also, the higher the quality of the video format is, the more storage space the video files will consume. This may pose a problem if you want to share these files with someone or upload them to a video sharing platform like YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, etc.

Remember the resolution of the screen-recording depends on the resolution of your smartphone’s display. The screen recording does not depend on your front or back camera sensors, it is independent of the same. Other than this, to reduce the file size of your screen recording, it is important to understand the relationship between video resolution, FPS, video codec, video quality and file size.

* Reducing the video resolution will make the file size smaller.
* Reducing the FPS value will reduce your file size.
* Using high-compression audio codecs such as AAC/MP3 too bring down the file size
* Reducing audio frequency also makes the file size smaller.

Not sure about these terms and wonder how you will play around with them. Worry not, as most present-day smartphones offer the option to adjust screen recording settings and it is quite simple to do. For example, OnePlus gives the option to choose resolution, bit-rate and FPS. Samsung allows users to adjust the resolution of screen recording. There are also several third-party screen recording apps available that let users select the screen recording parameters manually. Some phones may not allow you to tinker with all these parameters, but may offer one or two of these options. Here’s how you can go about changing the resolution in phones of some of the most popular brands. The solutions given below are native, except for in iPhones. As Apple does not offer any native way to reduce file size of screen recorded videos.

OnePlus
Open Quick toggle panel -> long press Screen Recording button -> adjust the parameters (reduce resolution to 720p or less, reduce FPS to 50) and start recording.

Samsung
One Quick toggle panel -> long press on Screen recorder -> reduce the resolution to 720p or 480p.

Realme/Oppo
Settings -> System Apps -> Screen recording -> tap video resolution and choose Medium or Low.

Xiaomi
Open Tools folder -> Screen recorder -> tap on ‘gear’ icon at the top right – > change resolution and video quality.

Apple iPhones
As mentioned above, Apple iPhones come with a built-in screen recorder but it’s very basic and does not allow users to take control of the resolution, reduce FPS or change other parameters. Users can download third-party apps from the App Store. These include apps like Screen Recorder + and Mobizen Screen Recorder. Both the apps allow users to control video resolution, bit rate and FPS. Along with this, they come with a video editor to further enhance or edit the video.

Another approach is to use a video editor to reduce the size. For this, you can use the smartphone’s built-in editor or other third-party apps. Click here to check out the popular video editing apps for smartphones.

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