Compress Video to a Target Size

The tool works out a bitrate from the size you pick and the length of the video, then encodes in two passes: the first pass measures which scenes need more data, and the second spends the budget where it matters. It aims at 95% of your target to leave room for the MP4 container. If the result still comes out too large, which is rare, it re-encodes once at a corrected bitrate. If that also misses, you get an error rather than a file over the limit. Sizes are decimal megabytes (1,000,000 bytes), so the result also fits limits quoted in MiB.

Discord's File Attachments FAQ says the free upload limit is 20 MB as of August 2026, up from 10 MB (Nitro Basic allows 50 MB and Nitro up to 500 MB). We checked this on 23 September 2026. The 10 MB preset fits with room to spare; for better quality on a free account, choose Custom and type 20. Discord now checks the size before its own compression, on desktop and mobile alike, so the size you see here is the size that counts.

On Automatic, the resolution follows the bitrate your target allows: about 4.5 Mbps or more keeps up to 1080p, and smaller budgets step down through 720p, 540p, 480p and 360p, because a sharp small picture looks better than a blocky large one. Video is never upscaled. Footage above 30 fps drops to 30 fps when the budget is under 1.5 Mbps. Audio becomes AAC at 32 to 128 kbps, never more than the original, and surround sound is mixed down to stereo. Subtitles, chapters and metadata such as phone GPS tags are removed.

Every second of video needs a minimum amount of data to stay watchable, so the tool refuses targets below about 92 kbps for video and sound together. In practice that is about 1 MB for a 1-minute clip and 4 MB for a 5-minute one. If your video does not fit, pick a larger size, or cut it shorter first with our Trim Video tool. If you only need the sound, the Video to MP3 converter makes a far smaller file.

MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM, MKV and AVI files up to 200 MB, 5 minutes and 4K resolution. That covers H.264 and HEVC from phones, including iPhone videos, VP8, VP9 and AV1 from the web, ProRes, DNxHD and older MPEG-4 formats. The output is always an H.264 MP4 with AAC audio, which plays on practically every phone, browser and chat app.

This runs on one shared server in Nuremberg, Germany, which handles one conversion at a time and deliberately runs the encoder at low priority so the service stays stable. Others wait in a short queue; when the queue is full you will see a message asking you to try again in a few minutes. Each visitor can run 10 conversions an hour. A 1-minute phone clip usually takes well under a minute, while a 5-minute 1080p video can take several minutes, plus the upload time on your connection.