Anyone shipping a product makes demo videos — a feature walkthrough, an operation flow, for the site, the community, the app store. The problem is these run hundreds of MB, and when it's just you, that's real cost behind them: storage on your server, CDN traffic to distribute, and slow downloads on the user's end hurting conversion. Double a video's size and all of those double with it.
So my habit now is to compress a demo video locally before distributing. A feature demo I recorded last week is the example.
The source was a screen recording: 2560×1440, 14 min 41 s, 371.5 MB, AVC + AAC. Putting that up as-is stings on both storage and distribution. I ran it through ImgIng's "size-priority" tier: it caps the longest edge at 1080 and the frame rate at 24, took 66 seconds locally, and came out 145.7 MB — 61% off. A demo is about the UI actions and the flow; 1080p24 is plenty clear, and that half-plus of size was free to lose.
What you save is worth spelling out. 371 MB to 145 MB halves storage outright; more importantly it's distribution — every user download, every CDN origin fetch runs the compressed size. That's a saving multiplied by download count, not a one-off. A demo on the site's front page, a few thousand loads a day, and compressing it is the difference in the monthly traffic bill. For a solo product, this "fix once, save continuously" kind of optimisation is the best value there is.
It compresses that much without going to mush because it's content-aware, not a flat quality drop. Before compressing it samples the video's texture, motion and change, and allocates the bitrate budget by content complexity — less to a static UI screenshot, more to a fast scroll. So at 145 MB the key actions stay sharp and what's saved is the background and transitions no one inspects. It also has a rule I appreciate: the result won't be larger than the source; if it's not worth it, it keeps the original or blocks the save — no compressing your way to a bigger file.
There's a layer that's extra worth it for a solo dev: the whole compression runs locally, the video never uploaded. That's not just privacy — with an online tool you'd upload 371 MB, wait for it to compress, download it back, and all that bandwidth and time is on you. Local compression skips that too, your server untouched. One-time local compute traded against three recurring costs: server storage, CDN distribution, and the upload-download round trip.
So don't ship the raw file. Spend a minute compressing locally — size halved, quality sufficient, server untouched. For a product carried by one person, this optimisation is unglamorous, but spread across distribution volume it's real money saved. Tool is ImgIng (imging.ai).
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