The bug that wasted my afternoon
I tried to set a video as my Telegram profile picture. I recorded a short clip on my iPhone, opened Telegram, and picked it as my avatar. Telegram accepted the file, showed a spinner, then quietly fell back to a static frame. No error. No warning. Just a still image where a looping video should have been.
Turns out Telegram has strict rules for video avatars, and iPhone video breaks almost all of them at once. The clip was HEVC, the wrong resolution, too long, and carried an audio track. Telegram does not tell you any of this. It just gives up.
I wanted the actual feature, so I dug into what the spec really needs and wrote a converter. This post is the result.
What Telegram actually requires
