Android 11 new improvements exposed: remove the 4GB size limit for single files

According to the XDA forum, Google may remove the classic 4GB file size limit on Android 11.0. Google made this decision in 2014, when the largest mobile phone with built-in storage on the market was only 32GB, SD cards were widely popular, and there were few mobile phones with 4K video recording capabilities. Therefore, Google decided that Android's MediaMuxer and MPEG4Writer classes were responsible for mixing (merging) video files and saving them as MP4 files, respectively, and should support the output of MP4 files with a maximum size of 2^32–1 bytes, which is about 4GB.

So if you use Pixel 4 to record 4K30FPS video now, the video file size will reach 4GB after 12 minutes. For this reason, the camera program will automatically save the file and start recording another video immediately. The whole process is automatic and the user will not be aware of it. However, when viewing the video file, you will find that the video you recorded is split into multiple files , which is not conducive to user uploading or further processing.

Moreover, five years later, mobile phones with 1TB storage have appeared on the market, SD cards have gradually disappeared from the public's view, 4K video recording has long been popular, and the public is even about to usher in 8K video recording function.

To this end, XDA discovered that Google is removing the 4GB size limit in Android 11.0. It is reported that Google has tested recording 32GB videos and even tried to fill the entire phone storage space with a single recording. Users may see this change in the Android 11 Beta in March 2020.