Compress video

Get a video under the limit an email, a chat app or an upload form is imposing on you. Pick a quality level, or just say how big it is allowed to be. The work happens on your own machine, so a large file takes real time rather than a long upload and a wait in a queue.

How to use it

1 Add the video you want to shrink.
2 Choose a quality level, or enter a size to stay under, such as 25 MB for an email.
3 Make the picture smaller as well if you can spare it. That saves far more than quality alone.
4 Encode and download the smaller file.

Formats this tool accepts

Each one has a reference page covering what it stores and where it is supported.

Questions about compress video

How small can a video get before it looks bad?

It depends far more on motion than on duration. A static talking head survives a very low bitrate, while handheld footage of moving leaves falls apart at the same setting. As a rough guide, 1080p at 2 to 4 megabits per second is solid for most content, and dropping to 720p saves more than any quality slider will.

Why is compressing slow?

Because the encoding is happening on your machine rather than on a server farm. Every frame is decoded, scaled and re-encoded. A minute of 1080p typically takes somewhere between a few seconds and a minute depending on your processor. Nothing is uploaded, which is the trade you are making.

Will the audio be re-encoded too?

Only if you ask for it. Audio is a small fraction of a video file, so leaving it alone is usually right. Re-encoding the audio to a lower bitrate is worth doing only when the video track is already very small.

Are my files uploaded to a server?

No. The whole thing runs inside the browser tab you already have open. Your file is read straight from your own disk, worked on there, and handed back as a download. Nothing is sent anywhere, nothing is stored, and there is no account and no queue.

Is there a file size limit?

There is no server-side limit because there is no server. The practical ceiling is your device memory, since the file and its output both have to fit in the tab. Files up to a few hundred megabytes are usually fine on a desktop machine, while phones and older laptops will struggle sooner. If a large file fails, close other tabs and try again.

Does it work offline?

Yes, once the page has loaded once. The engine is cached by the browser, so you can turn off your connection, reload the page and keep working. That is a useful side effect of doing the processing locally rather than a separate offline mode you have to enable.