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Smartphone cameras are evolving with each passing day, new technologies being incorporated, better camera lenses are deployed and AI is increasing the result provided by the hardware. Android's age old restriction of recording a video of maximum 4GB in size is now seems to be limiting the capacity of what a smartphone can do. But thankfully, this could possibly change next year in Android 11.
The size limitation of video recording annoys users with high end camera smartphones that lets them record 4K videos at 30fps, because these videos eats up a lot of space and 4K at 60fps means more big file size. Some smartphone manufacturers plan to launch devices capable of recording 8K video recording in the near future. For all of this, 4GB is quite limited.
The current 4GB limitation was a single MP4 file was first introduced with Google Nexus 5 in 2014 that came with 32GB of internal storage. The limitation has been passing on with each new Android version released since then, but it is now notable that smartphones with 512GB internal storage are available and they do not require this limitation in order to save space.
According to the description of a new commit in the AOSP gerrit, Google is updating the Android’s media classes to “use (a) 64bit offset in mpeg4writer” which will allow the OS “to compose/mux files more than 4GB in size.” This means Android will now let you record videos larger than 4GB in size without having to split them. Almost all 2019 flagship smartphones support 4K video recording and 2020 Flagships, like the Galaxy S11 series, are expected to record upto 8K video recording.
