Compress video

Compress video makes a recording light enough to send. You name the limit - 25 MB, 16 MB or a number of your own - and the page works out what has to happen to the picture to get there, then does it on your own device. The video is never uploaded, there is no account to create and nothing is charged, however long the file is or however often you come back.

A video gets lighter in exactly two ways: fewer pixels in each frame, or fewer bits spent on every pixel. The page walks down those two levers together, starting with the gentlest combination that should still fit your limit, and tells you before you press anything what the frame will become and roughly how heavy the result will be. The estimate is a range rather than a single figure, because how much a video compresses depends on what is in it: a talking head squeezes far further than a handheld shot of moving leaves.

Length is the one thing this tool cannot argue with. A one-minute clip fits into 25 MB with room to spare and hardly loses anything; an hour-long recording has to be cut down so far that the limit stops being worth it, and trimming a shorter piece is the better answer. The soundtrack is kept as it is unless you remove it, which frees up a useful share of the budget on a tight limit. The result comes back as an MP4 with H.264 video wherever the browser can make one, because that is the combination messengers, upload forms and older phones accept without complaint.

Sometimes the limit is not megabytes but the frame itself: you need exactly 720p and the weight is whatever it turns out to be. That is the second mode here - you name the short side or the width, the proportions stay untouched, and every button says up front what the real width and height will be. There are no sizes larger than the original: stretched pixels add no detail, only weight.