discord upload cap
Make a clip small enough for Discord to accept
Discord turns down oversized files without saying what the limit was or how close you got. These presets aim at the actual caps rather than leaving you to guess with a quality slider.
Processed on your own hardware · never transmitted, never stored
What happens when you drop a file in
The file stays put. Your browser opens it the same way an image viewer would. There is no transfer, which is why there is no upload bar to watch.
An encoder arrives once. The first job on this site pulls down a compiled build of FFmpeg, roughly 30 MB. It is kept afterwards, so every job after the first starts immediately.
Your own hardware does the job. The work happens in this tab, on your processor. A laptop from the last few years handles short clips in well under real time.
The result lands in Downloads. Assembled in memory and handed straight to your browser. Close the tab and every trace of it is gone.
Why gameplay clips fail so reliably
The cap is enforced strictly and communicated poorly. The upload simply refuses, with no partial progress and no indication of how much you needed to cut, which sends most people straight to a search engine.
Game capture is the usual victim. A single minute recorded at 1080p60 through OBS or ShadowPlay lands somewhere between eighty and two hundred megabytes, several times over the free tier's ceiling.
The consolation is that game footage compresses unusually well. Interface elements, static backgrounds and menus barely change between frames, and unchanging areas are exactly what a compressor spends almost nothing on.
If it still will not go through
Shorten the clip rather than compressing harder. Size follows length almost proportionally, so halving the duration halves the file, while pushing quality further down starts to smear anything that moves quickly. For a thirty second highlight the free tier preset lands under the cap on the first attempt nearly every time.
Common questions
How close to the cap does it get?
The presets aim below each limit with room to spare. The exact figure depends on how much motion the clip contains.
Does it work well for gameplay?
Unusually well. Screen and game capture compress far better than camera footage does.
Will it look bad?
At the free tier setting there is visible softening during fast movement. For a highlight watched in a chat window it holds up.
Does the clip get uploaded?
No — which is rather the point.