I wanted to set a video avatar on Telegram. Recorded a short clip on my iPhone, uploaded it, and nothing happened. No error message. No warning. Telegram just silently ignored my video. Took me way too long to figure out why. iPhones record in HEVC (H.265) by default. Telegram video avatars only accept H.264. But instead of telling you that, Telegram accepts the upload, returns a success response, and then quietly does nothing with your file. I built @LiveAvaBot to fix this. Send it any video or GIF, get back a file ready to use as your Telegram video avatar. Here's how the conversion pipeline works. What Telegram Actually Requires The documentation for video avatars is thin.…