smaller file
Get a video under whatever limit is blocking you
Email caps, chat limits, upload ceilings that reject the file without explaining why. Choose how hard to push and watch the size come down.
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.
What compression actually trades away
An encoder makes files smaller by discarding detail it expects you not to miss — fine texture during fast movement, subtle gradients in shadow. Push harder and it discards more. That is the entire mechanism, and the setting on this page controls it directly.
Light typically halves a file with nothing visible lost. Balanced lands nearer a quarter of the original and holds up completely for anything watched on a phone. Heavy will drag almost any clip under a messaging cap, at the cost of visible softness where the frame is busy.
Resolution is left alone throughout. A 1080p video comes back as 1080p; what changes is how much data describes each frame, not how many pixels there are.
The move most people skip
Shorten the clip first. File size follows duration more directly than it follows any quality setting, so cutting thirty seconds off the front beats another round of compression and costs nothing visually. Screen recordings are the happy exception — so much of the frame sits still that they compress extraordinarily well without trimming.
Common questions
How much smaller will it get?
Phone footage usually drops between half and three quarters at the Balanced setting. Screen recordings often fall by ninety percent or more.
Does the video get smaller on screen?
No, the dimensions are untouched. Only the compression level changes.
Can I compress something twice?
You can, but the returns shrink fast and the artefacts stack. Going back to the original source gives a better result than compressing a compressed file.
Why is this slower than the format converters?
Because every frame is genuinely re-encoded. Container conversions often just repackage what is already there.