How Opera’s video compression technology works

November 9th, 2015

How Opera’s video compression technology works

This week, we integrated video compression in Opera browser for Android, because we want you to enjoy videos online faster and without using up too much of your mobile data.

The technology “under the hood”

Video compression is a way of optimizing videos so that it’s perfect for your screen and network conditions. When you play a video on YouTube, Netflix or other video sites, those sites want to give you the best video quality available. And, who can blame them? They want you to like what you see. But, what they might not take into account is that you may on a limited data plan or have bad network conditions. In these cases, you don’t want a high-definition video that is way too big for your mobile screen anyway – sometimes quality is less important than a video that just works.

To bring you video compression, we use a technology called Rocket Optimizer, developed by Opera’s Skyfire division. Rocket Optimizer on average provides 60% compression by reducing the size of video and other multimedia content as needed to fit the available bandwidth. The technology can detect when you are facing poor quality of experience or connections that need assistance and intervene in milliseconds. This can reduce the long start times, rebuffering and stalls on video and audio streams that can be such a frustrating experience.

Recent research from Cisco indicates that nearly 75% of the world’s data traffic will be video by 2019, with a 13-fold increase in mobile video consumption from 2014 to 2019. What would your monthly bill be if you watched 13 times more video on your phone?

How to turn on video compression

From the settings menu of Opera for Android, tap to Data savings and tick the box next to Video compression. Opera will do all the rest. You’ll use less data and spend less time watching that darned buffering wheel.

We’re pleased to add video compression to our family of data-shrinking options for you. In addition to its arrival on Opera for Android, video compression is also available in Opera Mini for iOS and Opera Coast.