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Compress Video

Make videos small enough to email or upload, without wrecking them.

Make videos small enough to email or upload, without wrecking them. Free, with no sign-up, no watermark and no upload: it all runs in your browser.

What Compress Video 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.

How to use it

  1. Add your files. Drop them on the page or choose them. They stay on your device.
  2. Set the output format and quality. The defaults suit most files.
  3. 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.