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Forum Discussion
Are videos uploaded to Dropbox slightly compressed?
Hi - I've noticed that videos uploaded to Dropbox are slightly compressed (could be happening with other formats but I just haven't noticed). 1.4GB video turns into a 1.3GB video. An 18 MB video turns into a 17MB video. An 55MB video turns into a 53MB video. This is happening on both mobile and computer upload. Is this normal or is this something I can turn off to upload in full quality? If this is normal, what is the compression that's being run on these videos? Thanks.
radical_exponentDropbox Engineer
Hi @Redkanter,
I suspect what you might be seeing here is a difference of units. Some platforms use powers of 1000 for (KB, MB, GB, TB) and some use powers of 1024. See for example https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte and https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte
@radical_exponent Oh interesting. I re-downloaded the file to confirm and the file sizes do match with the original. That's super confusing for users FYI - it does seem Dropbox is the only one that's different. My phone (andriod), laptop (mac) and google photos all show the "same" file size in this case whereas Dropbox is the only one that shows a slightly different file size. You guys might want to considering changing this to be more consistent considering it seems like most others are showing it the other way.
- radical_exponent
I would love to make things all consistent, but unfortunately the major platforms don't agree.
For example, macOS uses base 1000, but Windows uses base 1024 😕
To clarify, are you seeing different sizes (ahem, units) when looking at the same file on in the Dropbox android app vs Dropbox on the web? Or when you say android do you mean what the system said, prior to importing the file into the Dropbox app?
