A preset chosen for real delivery
We encode H.264 at CRF 28 with the medium preset and 128 kbps AAC audio. CRF 28 is the point where most 1080p content loses a lot of weight while staying clean on a phone screen.
Compress Video Online
Make a video small enough to send or upload, without turning it into a blocky mess.
How to use it
- 1Choose the video file from your device (up to 500 MB).
- 2Set the options for compression.
- 3Start the job and watch the progress bar.
- 4Download the result before it expires 30 minutes later.
What makes this one different
Predictable results
Constant-rate-factor encoding targets a quality level rather than a bitrate, so a simple talking-head video compresses far more than a fast-moving one — which is exactly what you want.
Streams instantly
Output is written with faststart, so the file begins playing before it has fully downloaded when hosted on the web.
Formats and technical details
- Accepted input
- MP4, MOV, WebM and similar, up to 500 MB
- Video codec
- H.264 (libx264), preset medium, CRF 28
- Audio codec
- AAC at 128 kbps
- Typical reduction
- 60–80% for 1080p camera footage
- Resolution
- Unchanged — use the resize tool to scale down as well
What people use it for
- Getting a video under an email or messaging attachment limit.
- Reducing page weight for a video hosted directly on your website.
- Sending review copies to clients without waiting on a huge upload.
Limitations worth knowing
- Compression cannot rescue footage that was already heavily compressed — re-encoding an artefact-heavy file makes it worse, not smaller in a useful way.
- Resolution is preserved. If you need a 4K file to become genuinely small, resize it first, then compress.
- Free uploads are capped at 500 MB per file.
How video compression actually reduces size
A video codec stores one full frame and then, for the frames that follow, only what changed. The more motion and detail, the more it has to store. Compression settings decide how aggressively small differences are discarded.
CRF is the dial for that trade-off: lower means closer to the source and larger, higher means smaller and softer. CRF 18 is near-visually-lossless, CRF 23 is a common default, and CRF 28 is the aggressive-but-usable setting we apply here.
Compress, resize, or both?
Compressing keeps the same frame size and lowers bitrate. Resizing reduces the pixel count. For a 4K file destined for a phone screen, resizing to 1280 px wide removes far more data than compression alone, and the result looks better than a heavily compressed 4K file at the same size.
The usual order is resize first, then compress — that way the encoder spends its bits on pixels you will actually see.
Frequently asked questions
How much smaller will my video be?
Most 1080p camera footage lands between 20% and 40% of its original size. Screen recordings and animation often compress much further; heavy grain or fast motion compresses less.
Will the video look noticeably worse?
CRF 28 is a visible-but-mild step down on a large monitor and usually invisible on a phone. If you need higher fidelity, resize instead of compressing, or keep the original for archival.
Why is my compressed file barely smaller?
Because the source was already near that quality level. Compressing an already-compressed download has little room left to work with.
Does compression change the resolution?
No. Compression changes bitrate at the same pixel dimensions. Use the resize tool if you want fewer pixels too.
Is there a way to compress without uploading?
Not here — encoding runs on our servers. Your file is deleted 30 minutes after the job finishes.
Related tools
What people usually do next.
Resize VideoScale an oversized video down to a web-friendly width without distorting it.Trim Video OnlineSet an exact start and end point while previewing the video, then download just that section.Video to MP3 ConverterUpload a video and get its audio track as an MP3 — no account, no software to install.
Up to 500 MB per file. No account needed. Files are processed on our servers and deleted automatically 30 minutes later.