Compress a video for Discord

Discord's free upload limit is 10 MB. Target 9 MB and the file fits with room for the container overhead; target 8 MB if you are posting where an older bot or embed still enforces the old cap.

Compress a video for Discord

Pick a target and the bitrate is solved for you.

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.

Discord's limits, as they stand

AccountUpload limitTarget here
Free10 MB9 MB
Nitro Basic50 MB45 MB
Nitro500 MB450 MB
Older bots, embeds and mirrors8 MB7.5 MB

The free limit was raised from 8 MB to 10 MB, but 8 MB has not gone away: plenty of bots, embed proxies and archive mirrors still enforce the old number, which is why "compress to 8 MB" is still the phrase everyone searches. If you are posting into a server that runs bots, target 7.5 MB and stop thinking about it.

Keep it playable in the client

Discord plays your upload inline, and inline playback is much less forgiving than a desktop player. Two settings matter:

  • H.264, not H.265. The default here is H.264 for exactly this reason — H.265 uploads often show as a file to download rather than a video to watch.
  • Keep the audio. Removing audio frees bitrate, but a silent clip is usually not what you meant to post. Dropping audio to 64 kbps saves nearly as much and nobody notices on a meme clip.

Short clips, hard targets

Most Discord uploads are 10–40 seconds, which is the easy case: 9 MB over 30 seconds is about 2,300 kbps, and that is a clean 1080p. A 5-minute clip in 9 MB is 240 kbps and will look rough at any resolution — take the Auto resolution suggestion, which will drop it to 480p or 360p where those bits actually go somewhere.

Very short clips can overshoot the target slightly, because rate control has fewer frames to average over. If that happens the result card says so and offers a corrected retry, rather than letting you find out when Discord rejects the file.

How it works

  1. Pick your video

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

  2. Set the target size

    Type a number, or use a preset that matches the real limit. The bitrate is solved from the clip’s length.

  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.