Compress Video
Shrink a video for email, WhatsApp or upload, choosing the quality and the resolution yourself.
What it does
Compress Video makes the file smaller by re-encoding what is inside it, not by zipping it up. You choose how hard to push, and the size you end up with depends far more on what the file contains — photographs, scans, flat graphics — than on how long it is.
When you need it
Almost always an upload limit: a mail server that bounces anything over 10 MB, a portal that refuses the attachment, a form that silently fails, or a page that loads slowly because its images were never resized.
Limits and caveats
Compression is lossy at the stronger settings, and quality that has been thrown away cannot be recovered from the output — keep your original. A file that is already compressed will barely shrink, and that is the format working correctly, not the tool failing. Everything happens in your browser, so the file never leaves your device.
How to compress video
- Drop the video.
- Move the quality slider, and drop the resolution if it is bigger than it needs to be.
- Compare the sizes, and download.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the quality slider actually change?
- The CRF — a target visual quality that the bitrate follows, rather than a bitrate the quality has to fit into. Lower keeps more detail and makes a bigger file. Around 23 is visually indistinguishable from the original for most footage; 30 is clearly compressed but small.
- The file barely got smaller.
- Then it was already efficiently encoded. Dropping the resolution is what makes the difference in that case — a 4K clip stored at 1080p is a quarter of the pixels.
- Why not just give me a target size?
- Because hitting an exact size means two passes and a guessed bitrate, and the result is often visibly worse than picking a quality and accepting the size it lands on. The comparison is shown after each run so you can adjust.
- Do my files get uploaded?
- No. This tool runs entirely in your browser, so the file never leaves your device.