Compress a video for email

Gmail rejects attachments over 25 MB and Outlook over 20 MB. Set the target below, and the compressor solves for the bitrate that lands under it — in this tab, without uploading your video to anyone.

Compress a video for email

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.

The numbers that actually matter

Email attachment limits are set by the receiving server as well as the sending one, and the smaller of the two wins. These are the caps in practice:

ServiceAttachment limitTarget here
Gmail25 MB20 MB
Outlook / Microsoft 36520 MB18 MB
Yahoo Mail25 MB20 MB
iCloud Mail20 MB18 MB
A corporate mail serverOften 10 MB10 MB

Always aim below the cap. Attachments are MIME-encoded for transport, which inflates them by roughly a third on the wire, and mail servers count the encoded size. A 24.5 MB file really can bounce off a 25 MB limit. Targeting 20 MB gives you the headroom without costing you anything you can see.

What "20 MB" buys you

A fixed size divided by a length is a bitrate, and that is the whole calculation. 20 MB over one minute is about 2,600 kbps, which is comfortable 1080p. The same 20 MB over ten minutes is 260 kbps, which is not — at that rate 480p looks far better than a smeared 1080p, because the same bits are spread over a quarter of the pixels.

That decision is made for you. Leave Resolution on Auto and the tool picks the largest resolution the solved bitrate can keep sharp, then encodes two-pass so the result lands under your target instead of near it.

When not to compress at all

If the clip is long — a wedding, a lecture, a full match — do not email it. Twenty minutes squeezed into 20 MB looks bad no matter which tool does the squeezing. Put it in Drive, Dropbox or iCloud and email the link. Gmail will offer to do this for you when you attach something too large, and it is the right answer more often than compression is.

Compression is the right answer for the clip that is nearly small enough: a two-minute phone video at 180 MB that needs to be 20. That is a 9× reduction, and it is routine.

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.