Although today's Android smartphones have larger storage capacity, system limitations prevent the phone from saving video recording files larger than 4GB. However, this issue may change in Android 11, the next major version to be released in 2020.
The 4GB size limit of Android video recording files goes back to 2014, when SD cards were still widely used, and the first mobile phones with 4K video recording capabilities were just launched like the Galaxy Note 3.
Therefore, the demand for saving video files larger than 4GB is not large: most mobile phones do not have enough storage space, and the FAT32 format SD card itself does not support files larger than 4GB, and few mobile phones have high enough quality to record more than 4GB of video.
However, fast-forwarding for 5 years, the situation has changed a lot: Now with mobile phones with 1TB of storage space, SD cards are not common, and 4K video recording is everywhere, and 8K video recording will soon appear in mobile phones.
Today, if you record 4K video, the video will reach 4GB in about 12 minutes; this is the default quality setting with a frame rate of 30fps and a bit rate of 48Mbps.
After about 12 minutes of recording, the camera application will save the video and immediately start recording another video, which the user will not notice.
But when you look at the DCIM folder of your phone, you will notice that the video that should have been recorded continuously has been split into multiple video files.
For example, the 73-minute video recorded on Pixel 4 is split into 7 different files, all of which are treated as separate videos in Google Photos.
Before uploading these MP4 files to Google Photos, you also have to resort to a third-party application to merge them, and most people won't or don't know what to do.
For years, developers have been looking for a way to record video files larger than 4GB, and it seems that it can finally be implemented in Android 11.
According to the newly submitted description in the AOSP language, Google is updating Android's media class to remove the 32-bit file size limit. Specifically, Android will now "use [a] 64-bit offsets in mpeg4writer", which allows Android to "combine / mix files larger than 4GB in size." During testing, Google successfully composed a file with a size of approximately 32GB and can even fill the phone's full storage capacity with a single video recording in another test.
The first Android 10 beta was launched in March of this year, so it is expected to usher in the Android 11 beta in March 2020 and then release a stable version sometime in August 2020.
More on Tech Industry
