Telegram adds major video tool updates with quality, speed, and PiP options

Telegram has added a major upgrade to its video tool, it announced on Thursday (Oct.31). Among the upgrades, users can now choose the video quality for playback, enable Picture-in-Picture (PiP) mode, and adjust the playback speed.

The company announced that an upcoming update will introduce significant changes to how videos are sent and received.

The first major change is a new option allowing users to manually select the playback quality, from high to low. The feature, available only for users in channels with “thousands of subscribers,” helps viewers to choose video quality up to 1080p rather than defaulting to a compressed version.

In the past, videos on Telegram supported multiple playback speeds, and now users can speed up videos with simple gestures instead of navigating through settings. Telegram has provided instructions on using this feature. Users will need to press and hold on the right side of a video to activate 1.5x speed, then slide right gradually to increase the speed up to 2.5x. Releasing your finger returns playback to normal speed.

The update introduces an option to attach media to existing messages. This is perfect for users who want to send a video or picture along with a message but have previously seen the message appear above the image. Now, users can easily add an image directly to any text bubble they’ve already sent.

Edited messages now display a timestamp, indicating the time of the latest edit. If a message has been edited multiple times, only the most recent edit time will be shown.

The last two features appear to be available to all users, while the video quality selector is currently limited to larger channels. It would be great to see this option expand to everyone in future updates. Telegram notes that this update is now rolling out.

Despite numerous challenges, including the arrest of CEO Pavel Durov by French authorities in August, ReadWrite reported that the cloud-based messaging software reached 950 million active users this year.

Featured image: Telegram

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