Archive for the ‘Storage’ Category

The Great Storage Debate: How Much Memory Does Video Really Use?

October 20th, 2010 by John Burnette [No Comments]

Since content-pre-positioning is new technology, we frequently receive questions about how it works and its possible flaws or shortcomings.  Perhaps one of the most popular questions relates to how much memory a pre-positioned video takes up on a smartphone.  People are sometimes skeptical of pre-positioning because they assume that the pre-positioned content will consume too much memory and overwhelm the smartphone.

The truth is, video consumes a surprisingly small amount of memory.  Consider this:

  • Most smartphones today have 16GB of memory.  If you assume that the phone needs 2GB for the OS and other required software,that leaves approximately 14GB for other applications, such as video.
  • A good quality video clip that runs a few minutes requires 3MBytes/minute (~400kbps video rate x 60 seconds =  24kbits/minute / 8 bits/byte = 3MBytes/minute)
  • 3MBytes only consumes 0.02% of the memory on a 16GB handset

Now what about longer-length video?  What if you want to pre-position a movie, for instance?

  • A two hour movie in decent quality requires approximately 360MB (3MB/min * 120min = 360MB). To store 30 movies you need 10.8GB

With that said, it all comes down to how much action is in the movie since the more action, the higher the coded bit rate that is required for it to look good. So, for very high quality you could encode at 768kbps video / 64kbps audio mono 5760 + 480 = ~6MBytes/minute. This also assumes the whole movie is high action, which it often times is not.  Assuming it were, this makes a movie (like Batman, for instance) with lots of action and special effects reach up to 650MB for very high quality.

So even if you are pre-positioning action movies in high-quality, you can still safely store a surprisingly large amount of movies on your smartphone.   Following the logic above, you could fit approximately 20 full-length high-quality action-intense movies on your phone (650GB * 20 = 13GB).

Are you surprised that your smartphone has that much storage available?  What kinds of content do you like to store on your phone?