WhatsApp developing a way for users to send hi-res videos without attaching them as documents

WhatsApp is developing an improvement to the options that users have when they send videos from the app. Unless they send a video through WhatsApp as a document, their clips will be automatically compressed on its way to recipients which negatively impacts its quality. At the beginning of this month, WABetaInfo discovered that WhatsApp is working on a way for Android users to customize the quality of their video uploads on WhatsApp and send hi-res video to others.

The options being developed for WhatsApp beta users include “Auto,” “Best quality,” and “Data saver.” The “Auto” setting is the one recommended and continues using compression to send videos through a slower data network. “Best quality” will allow a WhatsApp user to share a higher resolution version of a video without having to send it as an attached document. Instead, with this setting, a high-res video can be sent through the app’s gallery (perhaps taking a little bit longer to disseminate because it is a larger file size) without a huge loss in quality.

“Data Saver” will send a video without you worrying that you are about to run through your data cap. Of course, saving data while sending video means that the quality of the clip is going to be lower. And today, WABetaInfo found that in beta version 2.21.14.16, WhatsApp users get the ability to not only improve the quality of video that they are sending, but also improve the resolution of photos being uploaded.

The three options for still photos are the same as the three offered for video: Auto (Recommended), Best quality, and Data saver. WhatsApp reminds users that “Best quality photos are larger and can take longer to send.” These options will be found in the “Media upload quality” section in “Storage and data” although this cannot be found yet on the current version of WhatsApp available from the Google Play Store.

WhatsApp users are hoping that this update will be arriving very soon.