Video Compressor

A video file's size is roughly its bit rate multiplied by its length, so there are only two ways to make it smaller without cutting it: spend fewer bits per second, or give those bits fewer pixels to describe. The compressor exposes both. Resolution scales the picture down, never up, to 1080p, 720p, 480p or 360p. The quality setting tells the encoder how much detail to keep in each frame. It starts at 720p and medium quality, because that combination reliably shrinks a phone recording while keeping it comfortable to watch on a phone or laptop.

Resolution usually gives the biggest saving with the least visible cost. Halving the width and height leaves a quarter of the pixels, and on a phone screen or in a chat window 720p is hard to tell apart from 1080p. Lowering quality at full resolution instead tends to show as blockiness on movement and smearing in dark areas, which people notice sooner than softness.

The encoding runs on your device with the browser's own encoder, which is usually hardware accelerated. The compressor cannot aim at an exact target size such as 25 MB, because the final size depends on how much motion the clip contains. A talking-head recording compresses far more than a football match at the same settings. If the first attempt is still too large, step the resolution down once more before lowering the quality.