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Under what conditions does iMessage downgrade shared video quality?

I noticed that when sharing videos to a group iMessage the video quality was significantly downgraded, while sharing the same video directly to an individual recipient didn't cause a quality downgrade.

As a specific example a 30.2Mb HEVC video got reduced to a 24.3Mb H.264 video and the converted video quality was awful. Wanted to see if there is a setting to turn off auto downgrade of videos when sharing.

Posted on Jan 26, 2024 10:21 AM

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5 replies

Jan 29, 2024 6:08 AM in response to RKapoor1973

The degradation is due to the message services super compressing the video, so it's a manageable size. Text services do not deal with really large files well.


The shorter the video, the smaller the original file size, the more quality you'll retain, universally speaking.


Going from native clients (iPhones using Apple's Messages platform) will have the least amount of degradation.


Going from one platform (say Android) to another (say Messages), they're speaking two different languages. Apple currently uses a more proprietary format, not as sophisticated as what other smart phone platforms use, and this will be the absolute worse degradation you'll see.

Under what conditions does iMessage downgrade shared video quality?

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