Video requirements and processing
For creators whose video was refused or is taking a long time — what EVVA accepts, what it builds, and how long it takes.
EVVA accepts one video shape: an MP4 file, H.264 video, AAC audio, up to 1 GiB. Anything else is refused during inspection, and the refusal is final.
The requirements in full
- Container: MP4. The file must be a real MP4, not merely renamed to
.mp4. - Video codec: H.264.
- Audio codec: AAC, if the video has sound at all. Silent video is fine.
- Streams: at most two — one video track and one audio track.
- Length: up to one hour.
- Dimensions: up to 4096 × 4096. Rotation recorded by a phone is taken into account, so a portrait clip is measured the way it will be shown.
- Frame rate: up to 120 fps.
- File size: up to 1 GiB.
A QuickTime MOV is refused even after you rename it to .mp4. So are WebM and Matroska, MPEG transport streams, AVI, ASF, FLV and OGG. EVVA reads what is inside the file, not the extension.
If your camera or editor produced one of these, re-export as MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio. HEVC (H.265) is not accepted either, and that is what many phones record by default in their high-efficiency setting.
What EVVA builds from your video
Three things, in order:
Inspection
The file is opened and checked against every requirement above. A file that fails here never gets further.
The quality levels are fitted to your source and never enlarged. A 640 × 360 clip produces one level, not four. Where more than four would apply, the smaller ones are kept.
Video is cut into 2-second pieces for streaming, which is what lets a fan start watching and skip around quickly.
How long it takes
Each packaging stage has a five-minute ceiling of its own, and a stage that hits a temporary problem is attempted up to three times, five seconds apart.
In practice: a short clip is usually done in well under a minute; a long, high-resolution one can take several minutes, because every quality level is encoded from the start of the file to the end. The media tile shows Processing… throughout and the publish button stays unavailable until it finishes.
Why a video can be refused after uploading cleanly
Two limits apply to the finished streaming package rather than to your file:
- The package may contain at most 7200 pieces — four quality levels of an hour-long video at two seconds each. A video that would exceed this is refused before any re-encoding starts, so it fails quickly rather than after a long wait.
- The package may not exceed 6 GiB in total.
Both mean the same thing for you: the video is too long, or too large, to be streamed at the quality levels it asks for. Shorten it, or export at a lower resolution.
When it fails
You see “Video processing failed. Remove it and upload again.” on the media bar, and Processing failed on the tile.
There is no retry, and no reason is shown beyond that sentence. Re-uploading the identical file will fail identically — the refusal is deterministic. Re-export the video as MP4 / H.264 / AAC, within the limits above, and upload the new file.
Related: What you can upload to EVVA and Why you cannot publish yet.