Optimizing Videos

Optimize your videos for seamless playlists.

Kelli avatar
Written by Kelli
Updated over a week ago

If your playlists are loading slowly, chances are your media files have something to do with it.

Video files can be quite large and are a common cause of lagging. Optimizing your videos for display on your screens can have a major impact on the performance of your playlists. We recommend checking and resizing your videos as necessary before uploading to your TelemetryTV media repository.

Click here to learn how to optimize images.

I've listed some factors below that can be adjusted to optimize your video. 

Resolution

Video resolution affects the file size of your video. Resolution refers to the number of pixels shown in your video, and is presented as a measurement of width x height.

The two most common screen resolutions are 1920 x 1080 pixels (1080p) and 3840 x 2160 pixels (4k). You should size your video to fit the resolution of your screen. For example, you should not display a 4k video on your 1920px x 1080px screen; you should resize it to a width of 1920px.

Audio

If you will not be enabling audio on your display, you should remove it from your file. This will have a significant effect on your file size. 

Bitrate

A video's bitrate is often measured in Mbps, and refers to the amount of information transmitted per second. This is a big factor in a video's size. Altering bitrate is slightly advanced, so we recommend researching how to adjust it if you'd like to do so. 

💡 Pro tip: Keep copies of your original video and name your new, resized copies based on their resolution. You never know when you'll upgrade from a 1080p to a 4k screen!

Resources

Resizing videos is not quite as simple as resizing images [add link]. You will need to use a tool to resize your file. Here are a couple simple options we recommend, but we also recommend doing research to understand what might work best for you!

  1. VideoSmaller (Web)

  2. Handbrake (MacOS / Windows)

Keep reading for instructions on each option.

VideoSmaller

As the name suggests, VideoSmaller is a free, online tool for reducing the file size of videos. Simply upload your video, and select the width you'd like to scale to. Here, I've selected 1920 as I am optimizing for a 1920 x 1080 pixel screen. To maintain quality, you can select "use low compression level" (you can also test with and without this option to see how much it affects your video). Finally, I'm choosing to remove the audio from my file as I won't be displaying it with sound. After you "Upload Video," you are provided with a link to download your new file.

Handbrake (MacOS/Windows)

Handbrake is one of the best open source tools for video transcoding.

It includes the following features, among others:

  • Change video size

  • Change video resolution

  • Change video and audio encoding

Below, we will show you the configuration in handbrake that best fits TelemetryTV's performance requirements.

On launch, the app asks you to choose your video file. Once selected, it shows a few tabs with options. The most important for us are: video, dimensions and audio.

In dimension, choose the resolution that best fits your screen (for example, 1080p or 4k).

In video, select the h.264 codec as this is what TelemetryTV uses and this will speed up upload time.

In the audio tab, you may decide to delete audio support for a video. If this is the case, set the recognized track to "none" in the tracks field.

To make sure you're good with audio, check the selection behaviors dropdown and leave AAC as codec and AAC as pass thru fallback.

Once you've completed these steps, click the start button to re-encode the video. The same configuration applies for other platforms, as Handbrake is cross platform tool.


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