Android 11, eliminated the size limit for videos

With Android 11 is eliminated the limit of 4GB size for videos: now you can record very long movies at maximum resolution

With Android 11 you can record videos much longer than in the past: the only real limit will be the space available on the memory of the smartphone. In the new version of Google's mobile operating system, in fact, the old limit of 4 GB maximum for video files has disappeared.

The Camera app currently present in Android 11 has, strangely enough, not yet been updated to this new feature, which indicates that you'll need to act on the code of each individual photo app to record videos weighing more than 4 GB. This is a minor change, however, so it's likely that as soon as Android 11 is released in its final version developers will be quick to update their camera apps. The 4GB limit dates back to early 2014, when top-of-the-line smartphones had a maximum of 32GB of internal space and it was common to add an SD card to the device to expand its storage space. These cards were formatted with the FAT32 file system, which doesn't allow you to write files beyond 4 GB.

What's the point of going beyond 4 GB

More than a question of video length, to be honest, it's really a question of weight: 4 GB is more than enough for the vast majority of videos recorded in HD and at 30 frames per second, but with the advent of cameras capable of recording 4K resolution videos (or even 8K, such as those that can be integrated into smartphones with SoC Snapdragon 865), this limit becomes too tight. The same can be said for slow motion videos, recorded at 60 or even 120 frames per second: in this case, in addition to the resolution there is also the high number of frames to be recorded to increase the weight of the video file. With 4GB of space, a 4K video can't be more than 12 minutes long.

The apps will be updated

Developers have been asking Google for years to introduce the ability to record video files larger than 4GB on Android. So they'll be happy to know that with Android 11, Google has finally done just that. It will now be up to them to update their camera app code to remove the 4GB limit.