Compress a 4K video

4K at 60 fps off a phone runs 400–500 Mbps of pixels and lands around 350–400 MB per minute. Downscaling to 1080p removes three-quarters of those pixels before the encoder even starts, which is why it saves far more than turning quality down.

Compress a 4K video

Pick a quality level; the file comes out as big as this clip needs.

Choose a video or drop it here

Read by this page, never uploaded. MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, AVI, WMV, FLV and more.

Nothing is uploaded

FFmpeg runs in this tab. Turn your Wi-Fi off after the page loads and it still works.

Hit an exact size

Say "under 25 MB" and the bitrate is solved for you, two-pass.

No account, no watermark

No sign-up, no email, no logo burned into your video.

No file-size cap

No 100 MB paywall. The only limit is your browser's memory, around 2 GB.

What 4K actually costs

4K is 3840 × 2160 — 8.3 million pixels per frame, four times 1080p. At 60 fps that is half a billion pixels a second, and phones record it at 45–50 Mbps to keep it clean. In practice:

SourcePer minuteTen minutes
iPhone 4K60 (HEVC)~400 MB~4 GB
iPhone 4K30 (HEVC)~190 MB~1.9 GB
GoPro 4K60~450 MB~4.5 GB
Drone 4K30 (H.264)~750 MB~7.5 GB

Downscale before you do anything else

Dropping 4K to 1080p removes 75% of the pixels before the encoder starts. Nothing in the quality slider comes close to that, and for anything watched on a phone, a laptop or in a chat app, nobody will be able to tell — 1080p is more resolution than most of those screens will show anyway.

Keep 4K only when the destination genuinely uses it: a 4K television, a YouTube upload you want in 2160p, or footage you are going to edit and crop into later.

Be realistic about doing this in a browser

This is the honest limit of the in-browser tool. WebAssembly caps a tab near 2 GB of memory, and a re-encode needs roughly three times the file's size free, so:

  • Under ~300 MB: comfortable. A minute or two of 4K.
  • 300 MB – 1 GB: works, but expect minutes, not seconds. Close other tabs first.
  • Over ~1 GB: use the iPhone app instead. It has no memory ceiling and the hardware encoder is an order of magnitude faster than one WebAssembly thread.

Time scales with output pixels, so downscaling to 1080p does not just make a smaller file — it makes the job roughly four times faster. If you are compressing 4K here, choose 1080p and the wait becomes reasonable.

H.265 for archiving

If the goal is to store the footage rather than send it, H.265 at High quality keeps 4K detail at roughly 30% less size than H.264. It is slow to encode in a tab — budget several times the clip's length — but for a keeper, it is the right trade.

How it works

  1. Pick your video

    It is read straight from your disk by this page. No upload, no queue, no account.

  2. Choose a quality level

    Balanced is visually indistinguishable on a phone or laptop at normal viewing distance.

  3. Compress in the tab

    FFmpeg runs in WebAssembly on your own machine. The first run downloads a 31 MB engine, once per browser.

  4. Download it

    The result is handed back as a file. Nothing was sent anywhere, so there is nothing to delete afterwards.

Questions people actually ask

Short answers here, the full story in the guides.

Is my video uploaded to a server?

No. The compressor is FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly and it runs inside this browser tab. Your file is read from disk by the page, processed in memory, and handed back to you as a download. You can load the page, disconnect from the internet, and compress anyway — which is the simplest proof there is.

Learn more: Is It Safe to Compress Video Online? →

Does compressing a video lose quality?

Yes, always — compression works by throwing information away. The honest question is whether you can see it. At a sensible bitrate for the resolution, most people cannot tell on a phone or laptop screen. Anyone promising "no quality loss" is describing the perception, not the file.

Learn more: Does Compressing a Video Lose Quality? →

How do I compress a video to an exact size?

Switch the tool to Target size and type the number. It reads the clip's duration, subtracts the audio budget, solves for the video bitrate that fits, and encodes two-pass so the result lands under the target rather than near it.

Learn more: Video File Size Calculator →

Is there a file size limit?

No limit we impose, but a browser tab is bounded by WebAssembly's ~2 GB of memory, and a re-encode needs roughly three times the file's size free. Files up to a few hundred MB are comfortable. Above about 1 GB, the iPhone app is the better tool.

Is there a watermark?

No. No watermark, no logo, no intro frame, no account, and no upload cap to unlock by paying. The output is your video, compressed.

Learn more: Compress Video Without a Watermark →

Which format should I compress to?

MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio, unless you have a specific reason not to. It plays on effectively everything. H.265 gives you a smaller file at the same quality but encodes much slower here and is refused by some uploaders and older devices.

Learn more: H.264 vs H.265: How Much Smaller? →

Compressing on a phone?

The iPhone app does this on the device, with the hardware encoder.