Smartphones are everywhere these days. In fact, I’m guessing that you don’t personally know all that many people who don’t own one.
Thanks to the massive library of apps that are available, modern smartphones have literally hundreds of uses besides simply placing telephone calls and sending SMS text messages.
One of their most common uses is playing multimedia files such as streaming videos, audio tracks and watching online movies.
But what if you want to save your favorite media files directly onto your smartphone so you can enjoy them while you’re stuck in a traffic jam somewhere out in the boondocks?
As you probably know, many of the most popular videos are professionally recorded and thus consist of huge multi-gigabyte files. That means it can be a serious challenge to save them to your smartphone so you can watch them at a later time.
Luckily, there are several things you can do to facilitate the saving (and playing) of large multimedia files on your mobile phone:
1 – Clean out old and unused items from the phone’s storage.
If you want to save and play large media files on your mobile phone, it can help to do a spring-cleaning of the phone’s storage (and it doesn’t even have to be spring time!).
So, which items should you delete to free up space on a maxed out phone? The first things I would recommend that you remove are old photos, videos and audio tunes that no longer need to reside on the device.
Important: I recommend that you back them up to the cloud or copy them onto your computer before you delete them. Just sayin’.
Next, you can delete old messages and chats that are no longer needed. (Note to self: I need to take my own advice here!)
Also, check your list of installed apps and see which ones you really don’t need or no longer use.
If your phone is anything like mine, you’re sure to find many old apps that were your favorites back in the day but haven’t been used in forever. If so, delete them! After all, you can always reinstall them from the app store if you ever change your mind.
And finally, it’s a good idea to make a quick check of your phone once a month or so to clean out items such as downloads that tend to build up over time.
2 – If your phone has a slot for one, use a microSD card for additional storage.
Does your particular smartphone have a slot for a microSD card? If so, I strongly recommend that you purchase one and plug it in right away.
Many modern smartphones can use a high-capacity microSD card to supplement the device’s internal storage space. Once the card is installed you can move many of your apps from internal storage to the card, freeing up valuable storage space for your media files.
3 – Clear your phone’s cache.
Your phone caches (i.e. stores) copies of photos and other data to make accessing those files faster when an app needs to access them again.
The amount of data stored in your phone’s cache can grow quite large over time, and most of that space will end up being wasted because the vast majority of those files will never be needed again.
That’s one reason (and there are others) why it’s extremely important to clean out your phone’s cached data from time to time.
4 – Convert large media files to MP4 format.
MP4 is currently one of the most popular media formats for use on mobile phones because MP4 files don’t take up as much space as many professionally recorded video files, such as MXF.
A good video converter program will convert your MXF file into MP4 to reduce the file size, and it won’t compromise the quality of the video.
You’ll need the help of a video converter program such as Movavi Video Converter to convert large video files like MXF files into MP4.
There are several really good apps that can make this conversion, but I’ve been using Movavi for years, and I love it.
You’ll find video conversion instructions at www.movavi.com/support/how-to/how-to-convert-mxf-video.html if you decide to use that converter.
Conclusion
Today’s smartphones have more internal storage than ever, but it won’t take many large multi-media files to fill it all up. The tips mentioned above can help you store more of those large media files on your phone so can enjoy them at any time.