What does "Scale" do?

[CaptainJAmazing]

Hello,

So I run a video studio for a fairly large university, and I got an email saying that many of our students learning remotely in other countries, presumably with slower connections, are having a hard time watching our higher-res video lessons. It's on me to figure out how to make them play faster with a slower connection.

So out comes my trusty VLC Media Player, which is my go-to for converting video right now (although I could always re-export from Premiere). I underwent a lot of trial-and-error, but one of my most successful formats was found this way:

I went to Media -> Convert/Save, selected the desired video file, hit the "Convert/Save" button, hit the wrench icon to Edit Selected Profile, went the Video Codec tab, then the Resolution sub-tab. I changed "Scale" from "Auto" to "1."

So it actually produced a really good-looking but smaller file that the person I sent it to was impressed with. Problem is, what did I do exactly? What does "scale" do? Something to do with video scaling? What does setting it to "1" mean? And is there any disadvantage of doing this that I'm not aware of? I should probably know this before I do this to all the videos. Thanks.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

It applies a scaling factor of... 1... over the pixel resolution. In other words, it does basically nothing.

[CaptainJAmazing]

It applies a scaling factor of... 1... over the pixel resolution. In other words, it does basically nothing.

Thanks, I thought that might be it. So why is the finished video so much smaller in filesize?