iOS 14 Low Quality iMessage Videos

[Stopher92]

Does anyone else have severe low quality videos/Live Photo when sending with iMessage? The video on my iPhone X is crystal clear but when ever I send it, it gets obliterated to super low quality. This occurred throughout iOS 14 beta and persists in the final. I did a factory reset, set up as new, with no luck..

Hi. I’m so glad I found you and your post. Back in September, I opened a case with apple on this issue and provided tons of screenshots and screen recordings proving the heavy compression on video files sent via iMessage. After weeks of going back and forth with apple, trying to figure out why this is happening to so many iOS users, apple finally gave up and sent me free AirPods as an appreciation for me working with them for so long, only for the issue to remain unresolved. I’m not sure if this issue will ever be resolved, but they definitely are aware of it. If you’re still working with apple, you’re more than welcome to give them my case number. Im assuming they keep the records. 101185552251

 

[rexone]

This is just such a weird & frustrating bug.
My iPhone 12 is set to low quality for messages & the images are fine, lower size & quality but usable. No problem at all.
My partners iPhone 12 mini is set to low & the images are all but useless. Tiny & blurry.
Here's an example of the difference between the two...

 

[Sithlord8]

Are you trying to submit pics/videos using the camera from inside your messaging app or attaching them with videos/pictures that you have taken already and then attaching? We ran into the same issue and found compression problems from an H.264 (bad) to a HEVC (good) difference using these two different methods and basically ‘solved’ this variance. If you’re in iMessage and click on the camera to take a video/picture it will apply the heavier compression (h.264) in our case and the tiny thumbnail appeared sometimes and the quality was bollocks. If you used the native camera app and simply attached/inserted a pic/video the included file was at the appropriate higher resolution and solved our issue. We were going from home Wi-Fi on a gbs network with reliable downs to a 5G service. Hope this helps as this seems to have solved the ‘ghost’ in our machine, as I have been personally trying to figure this one out ‘for a minute’. Seems like the problem lies in the messenger app/camera interface compression algorithm.