How to ensure videos play fluently?

FlippingBook Online Advanced, Team, and Enterprise allows you to upload MP4 videos up to 500 MB from your device directly into your flipbook.

If your video files are (too) high-quality, it can cause problems for your audience:

• Longer videos can constantly freeze or stutter while the next part of the video is buffering.
• Short videos with autoplay don't start up immediately but take a few seconds to load, spoiling the experience.

Even if your internet is fast enough, viewers with slower connections might face interruptions. To avoid slow loading and ensure smooth playback, it is important to keep all your videos as lightweight as possible. This article offers practical tips to optimize MP4 videos, helping you reduce file size while maintaining good quality.

Optimizing an MP4 video

If you (or your video editor) want to re-export your MP4 video file, then adjusting the resolution is the most important setting when optimizing for use in a flipbook.

• For an Inline Video that spans the full page width, a width of 640px is more than enough.
• If the video element doesn't cover the full width, you can set its width even lower. Make sure the 'maintain aspect ratio' option is enabled so the height adjusts proportionally.

Most of the time, adjusting the resolution is enough, but if needed, you can also adjust the framerate (24 fps is perfectly fine).  

Using FreeConvert to optimize an MP4 video

With Free Convert or similar services, you can convert non-MP4 videos to MP4 and/or reduce their size even if you are not an expert. Let's see how to optimize a video using FreeConvert.

The following method works well for most videos:

1. Upload your video. Select "MP4" as the output format
2. Change the resolution to Custom, and set the width to:
• 640px if you want the video to be page-wide.
• If it covers less, adjust the video resolution proportionally to 640. For example, if the video spans around 40% of the page, set the width to 640px x 40% = 256px.
3. Leave the height at 0 to keep the aspect ratio.

Balancing quality and efficiency

If you are afraid that this sacrifices too much quality, look at the example links below and see for yourself:

The final decision is up to you, but generally speaking, a hardly noticeable sacrifice in quality is well worth the trade-off to ensure your viewers can enjoy your videos without interruptions!

Need extra help? Contact our Support Team or feel free to book a meeting with one of our Customer Success Specialists.

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