A data report from RedPanda Compress. All statistics are aggregates over tens of thousands of real-world video files analyzed in August 2026 — percent-only, no user-level data. Reuse welcome with attribution (see the end of the post).
Methodology & privacy, up front
RedPanda Compress is a browser-based video compressor: files are processed entirely on the user’s device and never uploaded. The telemetry behind this report is deliberately coarse — pre-bucketed ranges (resolution class, duration range, bitrate range), codec names, and connection-quality classes. No filenames, no file contents, no metadata atoms (camera model, GPS), and no per-user profiles; the categories match our public privacy page.
Known biases: this is not a census of “all video” — it is a census of video people need to shrink, so heavy formats are overrepresented. Orientation and resolution could not be determined for roughly a third of files; those are excluded from the orientation and resolution figures. Connection classes come from the browser’s Network Information API, which estimates effective quality — “3G” means “performs like 3G,” not a cell contract. Encoder provenance was measured on a large subsample.
Finding 1 — H.264 is still 82% of everything. AV1 is statistically invisible.
| Codec | Share of files |
|---|---|
| H.264/AVC | 82.1% |
| HEVC/H.265 | 13.2% |
| MJPEG | 1.6% |
| MPEG-4 Part 2 (the DivX/Xvid era) | 1.4% |
| ProRes | 0.23% |
| AV1 | 0.22% |
| VP9 | 0.18% |
| VP8 | 0.08% |
Twenty-three years after standardization, H.264 remains the water everyone swims in. The striking pair: files encoded with ~2003-era MPEG-4 Part 2 still outnumber AV1 files six to one. AV1 has won the streaming-platform war — YouTube and Netflix serve it billions of times a day — but in the world of files people actually hold (camera output, exports, downloads, old archives) it has essentially no presence. Codec adoption in personal files is generational, not technological: files outlive the codecs that made them, and the encoder defaults of cameras and apps — not the preferences of standards bodies — decide what the world’s disks look like. The one codec visibly gaining is HEVC, and it is gaining the same way H.264 did: by being a phone camera default.
Finding 2 — “Video” no longer means “clip”
| Duration | Share |
|---|---|
| < 15 s | 11.8% |
| 15–60 s | 22.5% |
| 1–5 min | 30.1% |
| 5–20 min | 17.1% |
| 20–60 min | 10.5% |
| ≥ 1 hour | 7.8% |
Nearly one file in five runs longer than 20 minutes, and roughly one in thirteen exceeds an hour — lectures, meetings, screen recordings, gameplay sessions. The mental model of compression as “shrink this phone clip” misses a fifth of the real workload: video is now also a document format, the recording of something that took an hour because the thing itself took an hour.
Finding 3 — Nearly a quarter of desktop video is vertical
Orientation of files processed on desktop computers (where orientation could be determined):
| Orientation | Share of desktop files |
|---|---|
| Landscape | 70.5% |
| Portrait | 23.2% |
| Square | 6.3% |
Vertical video was born on phones, but it now flows routinely through desktop workflows — footage synced, transferred, or downloaded to a PC for editing and sharing. Desktop software that treats portrait video as an edge case is failing nearly a quarter of real files.
Inside the square segment hides this report’s favorite curiosity: 61% of all square videos are below 360p, and 71% run under 15 seconds — a distinct, many-user cluster consistent with animated chat-sticker and emote culture. Even a three-second looping sticker is worth compressing when a chat app enforces a size cap.
Finding 4 — The 5–10 Mbps world, and the quarter that’s already been compressed
Container bitrate (size × 8 ÷ duration) of source files:
| Bitrate | Share |
|---|---|
| < 1 Mbps | 10.7% |
| 1–2 Mbps | 14.2% |
| 2–5 Mbps | 16.1% |
| 5–10 Mbps | 23.2% (modal) |
| 10–20 Mbps | 20.4% |
| 20–50 Mbps | 9.3% |
| ≥ 50 Mbps | 5.8% |
The modal file arrives at 5–10 Mbps — the default output of phone cameras and screen recorders. But the tails tell the story. One file in seven exceeds 20 Mbps — modern phones shooting high-bitrate 4K their owners immediately need to shrink. And a full quarter of files arrive below 2 Mbps: video that has already been compressed once, being compressed again to squeeze under some app’s attachment limit. Both tails are artifacts of the same mismatch — recording defaults and sharing limits are set by different companies, and users are stuck reconciling them.
Finding 5 — The users the cloud forgets
Roughly one compression job in ten starts on a connection the browser classifies as 3G-class or slower (per the Network Information API’s effective-quality estimate); on desktop alone the share is about one in twelve. The label surprises until you remember what the API measures: effective throughput, which sweeps congested Wi-Fi, VPNs, tethering, and ISP throttling into the same bucket as genuine 3G.
For this population, uploading a gigabyte of video to a cloud service is somewhere between painful and impossible. Client-side processing isn’t a privacy preference for them; it is the only version of the product that works at all.
Finding 6 — 41% of everyday video has been touched by FFmpeg
Video files carry faint fingerprints of the last software that wrote them. Classifying those fingerprints on a large subsample:
| Last writer | Share |
|---|---|
| FFmpeg-family (Lavf muxer) | 41.0% |
| Other/indeterminate tools | 28.8% |
| Video editors | 12.4% |
| Android phone cameras | 7.7% |
| Unclassifiable | 4.2% |
| Apple cameras | 2.8% |
| Platform downloads (YouTube-style) | 2.2% |
| Action cameras | 1.0% |
Two things stand out. First, FFmpeg — one open-source project — was the last tool to touch two files in five. It is the invisible plumbing inside converters, downloaders, editors, transcoding pipelines and apps that never mention it; no other single piece of software comes close.
Second, read the camera rows together: only about one file in nine still carries a camera’s own fingerprint. Everything else has already been through at least one piece of software — trimmed, converted, downloaded, re-muxed — before reaching us. The “original” straight-off-the-camera video is, by the time anyone needs to share it, a minority artifact.
Honest limits: the fingerprint only names the last writer, not the chain; “Lavf” is a giant catch-all for anything built on FFmpeg; and a missing fingerprint does not prove a file came straight from a camera.
Finding 7 — .mp4 is a monoculture, and one MP4 in seven is lying to you
By file extension, everyday video is astonishingly uniform: nine files in ten are named .mp4. MOV takes most of the rest (7%); MKV, AVI and WebM are all below 1% each. The container war is over.
But the label has quietly stopped meaning what people think it means:
What’s actually inside a .mp4 | Share |
|---|---|
| H.264 (plays everywhere) | 85.2% |
| HEVC | 11.6% |
| MPEG-4 Part 2 | 1.3% |
| MJPEG | 1.2% |
| AV1 + others | 0.7% |
14.8% of .mp4 files — one in seven — don’t contain H.264, and most of those carry HEVC, which still fails to play in many browsers and on many non-Apple devices. “It’s an MP4, it’ll play anywhere” was true for fifteen years; phone cameras defaulting to HEVC-in-mp4 have silently broken it. The extension names the box, not the contents — and the box is no longer a guarantee.
(A small aside for trivia lovers: 3% of files have no audio track at all — mostly screen recordings and camera timelapses.)
Summary for the impatient
- H.264 is 82% of personal video; AV1 is 0.22% — still outnumbered 6:1 by DivX-era MPEG-4.
- Nearly 1 in 5 files exceeds 20 minutes — compression is now a meetings-and-lectures workload.
- 23% of desktop video is vertical — and 61% of square video is sub-360p chat stickers.
- The modal file is 5–10 Mbps, but a quarter of files are re-compressions of already-compressed video.
- ~10% of compression jobs start on ≤3G-class connections — the population client-side tools exist for.
- FFmpeg was the last tool to touch 41% of files; only ~1 in 9 still carries a camera fingerprint.
- 90% of files are named .mp4 — but one MP4 in seven doesn’t contain H.264 and may not play everywhere.
Reuse this data
Data and charts may be reused with attribution and a link to redpandacompress.com. Questions about methodology: support@redpandacompress.com. All statistics are aggregates over coarse buckets; no user-level data exists to share. If you’re curious how a browser can analyze and compress video without uploading it, we’ve written up how the in-browser pipeline works and how to verify no upload happens.
Fei is a skilled software engineer. He previously worked at Google and now at a startup. His expertise includes web media processing, cloud architecture, complex algorithms, and AI training and deployment. Beyond work, Fei enjoys diving into new knowledge and is a big fan of strategy games.
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