When you spend over $1,000 on a new flagship phone, you’ll understandably want to take full advantage of its camera hardware by recording videos in the best possible quality. The downside is that you’ll run out of storage space faster, potentially forcing you to pay for more cloud storage. While this issue affects every phone, the new Google Pixel 10 series has a solution to help mitigate it: the ability to switch to a more efficient video recording codec.
Put simply, a codec is an algorithm for compressing and decompressing digital media. It consists of two parts: an “encoder” that compresses the data to create a smaller file and a “decoder” that reads the compressed file for playback. Video codecs vary in how they balance quality and file size; some are also royalty-free, while others require licensing fees.
