Video Compressor
Make videos small enough to email or upload, without wrecking them.
Free video compressor: make a video small enough for Discord, email or WhatsApp without wrecking it. No watermark, and nothing is uploaded.
What Video Compressor is for
For a file that will not send: a Discord limit, a Gmail attachment, a form that caps uploads. Resolution and bitrate do the real work here, and dropping a 4K clip to 1080p usually saves more than any quality setting will.
Which setting to change first
Quality first, resolution second, frame rate last. Stepping quality from High to Balanced typically halves a phone video with no difference anyone notices on a phone screen. Dropping from 1080p to 720p roughly halves it again. Frame rate helps least, except for screen recordings, where 15 or 24 frames per second is plenty.
Sound is a small part of most videos. Lowering the audio bitrate to 96 or 64 kbps only matters for long talks and lectures, where it is most of what is left.
How small is small enough
For Discord on a free account the ceiling is 10 MB; for Gmail, 25 MB; for Outlook.com, 20 MB. If you have a number to hit, the size presets on this site find the best quality under it for you, rather than making you guess and try again.
Why the result is MP4
MP4 with H.264 plays on every phone, TV, browser and messaging app, so a compressed file is useful wherever it ends up. WEBM and MKV are there if you need them, but MP4 is the answer nine times in ten.
If it barely got smaller
The video was probably compressed well already, as streaming downloads and messaging-app videos usually are. Re-compressing a compressed file mostly costs quality. Trim it shorter instead: length is the one thing that always shrinks a file in proportion.
How to use it
- Add your files. Drop them on the page or choose them. They stay on your device.
- Set the output format and quality. The defaults suit most files.
- Press convert and save the results, individually or as one ZIP.
Questions
How do I get a video under a specific size?
Lower the resolution first, then the quality. Halving the resolution cuts the data to roughly a quarter. There is also a tool that works backwards from a size limit and finds the best quality that fits under it.
What makes a video file large?
Bitrate, which is resolution and frame rate together, far more than length. A short 4K clip at 60 frames a second is bigger than a long 720p one.
Will compressing make it look bad?
Not at a sensible setting. The visible damage appears in fast motion and fine detail first, so a talking head survives compression far better than a landscape pan.
Is it better to trim or to compress?
Trimming, when there is anything to cut: removing thirty seconds you did not need costs nothing in quality at all, whereas compression always costs something.