Thanks to its popularity, WhatsApp is used for everything from catching up with friends to conducting business dealings. This could involve sending multiple photos and videos back and forth. While the Meta-owned messaging service has gained several useful features in recent years, photo and video sharing remains a pain point as they are heavily compressed before being sent. WhatsApp was spotted testing theability to send HD-quality photos in a recent beta, and that same option has now popped up for videos in the latest beta build.
WhatsApp lets you share files up to 2GB in size. But for videos, you are limited to a paltry size of 16MB. This is not enough in this day and age, especially when thebest Android smartphonesare capable of recording 8K footage. When sharing a video through the platform, WhatsApp automatically downsizes and compresses the file to reduce its resolution, quality, and size.
In WhatsApp beta for Android v2.23.14.10, some beta testers report seeing an HD button while sharing a video. Tapping on the option will let you select between Standard or HD quality. The latter will seemingly retain the original video resolution, which also leads to a notable increase in size. While the video will take longer to send, it will have substantially better quality than the standard option, which is optimized for faster sending.
Standard remains the default option, though, so you’ll manually have to select HD whenever you want to send a sharper-quality video. AsWABetaInfonotes, compression is also applied on HD-quality videos, so there will be a loss in details. An HD tag will appear on the higher-resolution videos shared so the sender can easily identify them.
WhatsApp could roll out the option to share HD videos on its platform to more beta testers in the coming weeks. As for the public release, the company will likely launch the HD photo and video sharing options together in probably a few weeks.
