Compress video

Every file-sharing platform has a size ceiling: WhatsApp caps at 16 MB for video, Discord at 25 MB for free accounts, Gmail at 25 MB for attachments, and most email clients at 10 MB. A single minute of 1080p footage from a modern smartphone typically sits between 100 and 200 MB. Without compression you are either converting to a link or trimming the clip before sending.

Compression is also the difference between a portfolio site that loads instantly and one that hangs on a video background. A 30-second hero video at 2 MB autoloads on mobile; the same clip at 80 MB does not. The goal is not to make the file look bad, it is to reduce the parts of the data that human eyes cannot distinguish anyway.

The tool uses libx264 (H.264) as the video codec with a CRF value you control. CRF is a quality-based rate control mode: lower numbers mean better quality and larger files, higher numbers mean smaller files with more compression artifacts. The default CRF of 23 is FFmpeg's own recommended default and is considered visually near-lossless for most content.

Unlike the ultrafast preset used in other tools on this site, compression uses the faster preset. This is intentional: ultrafast encoding produces larger files because it skips compression work that saves space. For compression specifically, the faster preset strikes a better balance between encode time and output file size. Platform-specific presets (email, WhatsApp, Instagram) add a scale filter that downscales the video dimensions proportionally: scale=640:-2 for email, scale=1280:-2 for WhatsApp, scale=1080:-2 for Instagram. The audio is re-encoded to AAC at 128 Kbps and the output includes +faststart for browser streaming.

The CRF slider is the primary control. For most sharing (social media, messaging apps) CRF 28 to 32 produces files under 10 MB per minute of video at 720p with no obvious visual degradation. For archiving or anything you plan to re-edit, stay at CRF 18 to 23.

If the output is still too large after raising CRF, the next lever is resolution. Dropping from 1080p to 720p cuts file size roughly in half with no CRF change. Use the platform presets for this rather than guessing pixel values.

Screen recordings and animation compress dramatically better than live action because they contain large areas of identical pixels between frames. A 5-minute screen recording can often compress from 200 MB to under 5 MB without any visible loss.

Cloud-based compressors upload your full original file to a remote server, which means anything private (internal demos, unreleased footage, personal clips) leaves your machine. Handbrake is the standard desktop tool and gives excellent results, but has a steep settings curve for new users and requires installation. This tool runs the same underlying codec (libx264) entirely in your browser: no upload, no account, no install, and the output is indistinguishable from what Handbrake would produce at equivalent settings.