Android 11 may finally remove the silly video size limit
Have you ever had this happen to you: you record a long video on your phone, then go back to check it out and you discover it has been split in two or more clips? Or, worse but much more rare, the phone just stopped recording at some point? Well, you see, Android has a size limit on the videos it records — 4 GB is the absolute maximum. That's why our handsets have to work around this by cutting a long video into clips.
To put it in perspective, you need a bit more than 10 minutes of 4K video to hit that 4 GB threshold. So, it may have not been an issue for most users in their daily life, but if you are trying to record a long event like a sports match, a birthday present unpacking, or if you are dreaming of shooting short movies with your phone, it will rear its ugly head. If you want to, you can stitch the clips together via an app or by uploading them to your computer and using software of choice. But yeah, this takes will and time.
Well, this minor annoyance may be gone come Android 11. The folks over at XDA Developers have been doing what they do best — poking around Android code — and they've found an interesting line that supposedly addresses this very issue.
It's a commit in the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) gerrit, which states that Android will use a 64 bit offset in mpeg4writer (as opposed to 32 bit previously). This should raise the limit "considerably", though no exact ceiling is given. In one test, Google was able to record a single 32 GB video without a hitch. In another, the phone's entire capacity was filled with a single video, not clipped at any point.
So, video buffs, rejoice! 4K is about to become that much more viable.
Things that are NOT allowed: