H.264 vs H.265: How Much Smaller?
H.265 (HEVC) produces roughly 25–35% smaller files than H.264 at the same visual quality. The often-quoted "50% smaller" comes from the standard's own test conditions at 4K; for everyday 1080p phone footage, a quarter to a third is what you should expect.
What that means in practice
| Clip | H.264 | H.265, same quality |
|---|---|---|
| 1 min, 1080p30 | ~38 MB | ~27 MB |
| 1 min, 1080p60 | ~56 MB | ~39 MB |
| 1 min, 4K30 | ~150 MB | ~100 MB |
What it costs you
- Encoding time. In a browser tab, H.265 runs about four times slower than H.264. On a phone with a hardware encoder the gap nearly disappears — which is why your iPhone records HEVC without breaking a sweat but your laptop struggles to encode it.
- Compatibility. This is the real cost. Windows needs an HEVC extension that is not installed by default. Some Android phones, older TVs, Discord's inline player and various upload forms will refuse it or show it as a file rather than a video.
When to pick which
H.264 for anything you are sending to another person, uploading to a platform, or playing on hardware you do not control. It plays everywhere, full stop.
H.265 for storage and archiving, for Apple-to-Apple sharing, and when the file is large enough that a third off genuinely matters and you can afford the wait.
The mistake worth avoiding
Re-encoding an HEVC file to HEVC "to make it smaller" achieves little and costs a generation of quality. If an iPhone MOV is too big, the win is in resolution and bitrate, not in the codec it already uses. The one good reason to re-encode HEVC into HEVC is when you are also downscaling.
Conversely, converting HEVC to H.264 makes the file larger at the same quality — but that is the right trade when the goal is a file that plays on a Windows PC rather than a smaller one.
What about AV1?
Better again — roughly 30% beyond H.265 — but encoding it is far slower still, and support outside recent browsers and Netflix-class platforms is thin. It is not offered here, and for sending a file to a person it is the wrong choice today.
Compress an MP4 → Runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.