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Just came across this issue when downloading an Eduarda Bezerra video. First time downloading from TikTok.
I re encoded it to mp4, lossless, and the file size exploded to 60+ MB.
Any tips on how to get the video uploaded here while retaining the image quality?
I am not sure but you can use a program called handbreak to rencode the file sometimes. you can just make it use a more efficient codec if that is not good enough try to check if it's wasteful with the quality. like the sound being too high quality using lossless compression also helps and reducing the quality by a little will be almost impossible to detect and it makes a big difference. you if you are desperate check if the frame rate is high and reduce it to 24 .this site has high quality standards but if it's in 4k it is really too much for this site if its more than a few seconds long. but generally unless the video is super long or 4k 60fps they are probably just using inefficent encoding
The only codec GWM originally supported was AVC/H.264, but we also usually allow the VP9 codec nowadays (even if it's not currently Safari-compatible) since that's the only way some higher Youtube resolutions and such are available. Decreasing the sound quality or even removing the audio track entirely isn't usually going to save you much file size (no social media video is going to be using lossless audio). I also wouldn't recommend trying to fiddle with the framerate, if it can't be converted without losing quality at its current length you're probably better off just trying to trim off the least interesting parts of the video to make it smaller.
I'm not a huge fan of Handbrake for conversion, I generally think something like Avidemux is more user-friendly for basic cutting and conversion. (I use FFmpeg Batch for most conversions personally, but it's fairly non-intuitive and requires looking up ffmpeg command strings for the fancier stuff)
I don't know exactly which video on Eduarda Bezerra's Tiktok you're referring to, but if it's longer than about 20 seconds it's probably not a great candidate for conversion and upload. If you want to point it out I can give some advice. I tried grabbing this one using Snaptik as an example:
https://www.tiktok.com/@eduardabeezerra/video...
The original file is a 56-second 18MB HEVC-encoded mp4 at 1080x1920, so it would need the video codec changed to AVC (mp4 is just the container format). I was able to get a converted 20-second clip from it under 25MB by setting a Constant Rate Factor for the conversion slightly higher than I'd prefer (18 when I usually try not to go above 16, since lower = better), but it doesn't look bad at all, just slightly less sharp than the original:
You may or may not be aware that there are generally two versions of videos available on TikTok's servers, the one with a logo superimposed on it that you generally see, and a somewhat higher-quality logoless version that you usually have to use a site like tikdown.org, snaptik.app, or ssstik.io to get. I believe the logoless version is the actual originally-uploaded file, or at least closer to it, and generally recommended for upload to this site (TikTok has to recompress the videos to add their logo, which makes them look worse).
Recently I noticed that the logoless versions of some videos only seem to be available as higher-resolution HEVC/H.265-encoded MP4s. The actual container format seems to be closer to Quicktime .mov's, but .mov and .mp4 are basically the same container plus or minus a few bells and whistles anyway. The real issue is the video encoding. GWM doesn't allow uploading HEVC videos, for good reason: basically no browsers support them outside of Safari.
These new higher-quality logoless versions (we'll call them the 'HD' versions as some of the download sites seem to be doing) seem to generally be 720x1280 or 1080×1920 (the maximum upload resolution TikTok allows), rather than the 576x1024 that was standard for both the logo'd and logoless versions previously. I can confirm that the HD versions seem to be coming from TikTok's servers, since I'm able to download the same versions directly with a browser extension in some cases. They also seem to be genuinely better-quality originals and not upscales, as far as I can tell.
Theoretically the HD versions can be converted to standard AVC/H.264 MP4's that GWM supports, but that's both a pain, and in a lot of cases would balloon the filesize past the 25MB limit if you have the encoding quality set high enough to maintain the better look.
I should note that this isn't universal for all videos. I first noticed this with Brissa Allen's TikTok. This one for example has the HEVC HD version available without a logo while the 576x1024 AVC version still has the logo on it, no matter which download site you use. This one has both standard and HD logoless versions available, if you use one of the sites that lets you choose. This one seems to have only the HD version available, regardless of which option you pick.
I'm glad higher-res versions are available, I just wish TikTok had stuck with AVC for the encoding. I imagine they're trying to save on server space and bandwidth since HEVC gives smaller filesizes. There are some other interesting technical details, but the upshot is that none of the HD versions can be uploaded to GWM without performing a lossy conversion on them, and some videos won't have usable versions available using a lot of download methods at all, without needed to be converted. I'm also going to be switching back to using snaptik for downloading myself (I had been using tikdown), since it lets you choose between versions, which is more important now.