Improving whatsapp Video Statuses using FFMPEG and Software based encoding

Modern devices have larger screens and higher resolutions thereby showing the loss in video quality even at smaller video display sizes in WhatsApp status. This paper tests and evaluates a way in which the video quality for WhatsApp statuses can be improved using software encoding and different encoding parameters. This paper also evaluates the availability of software encoding in modern mobile devices which help in better encoding of videos at the cost of using CPU. The audio codec is kept the same as the one WhatsApp uses and for the video codec as well, after some study we have decided to stick with H.264 [1], [2]. We used FFMPEG on mobile to first make a demo application and change parameters to allow us to remain under the size constraint of whatsapp [3]. With all this, we tried to improve the quality of videos and ensure that the file size constraint put by WhatsApp is never passed even under the worst conditions. For video quality assessment, we have used 3 methods, Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Video Multi-Method Assessment Fusion (VMAF) [4], [5], [6].