WhatsApp users have long bemoaned the messaging app's annoying habit of butchering the quality of media by compressing it beyond salvage. Galaxy S20 and Galaxy S21 users, in particular, still have no reliable way of sending through their beautiful 8K videos to non-Samsung users. That makes sense for the platforms, given that high-resolution photos and videos can take up quite a lot of space. But a future version of WhatsApp will let you send the full uncompressed version of your file, according to a discovery by WaBetaInfo.
WhatsApp's video quality is about to get a lot better
As you can see in the screenshot below, the newest WhatsApp beta for Android lets you customize the quality of videos. The ‘Auto' setting lets WhatsApp determine which video should or should not be compressed. ‘Best Quality' will send your video as is, or in very high quality, regardless of the resolution and ‘Data Saver' will compress all of your videos. Currently, the feature is only limited to videos, but we see no reason why it shouldn't apply to photos via a future upgrade. While the prospect of sending an 8K video over WhatsApp is an exciting one, it is unclear as to how many people will actually use it.
We determined that the Galaxy S20 takes up an eye-watering 600MB per minute of 8K video recorded. Furthermore, file sizes cannot exceed 4GB due to restrictions in Android's filesystems. Therefore, you could be stuck sending multiple files that may or may not arrive in the correct order. Uploading the said files could take a while, too, depending on your internet connection. Plus, an 8K video doesn't look a whole lot different from ones captured at 4K, at least on most mobile devices. Lastly, many people would find the prospect of burning through their daily data allowance for a video to be a tad annoying.
