Compress Video
Shrink a video file to a target size or quality level.
How to compress video
- Drop a video in.
- Choose CRF mode for consistent quality or target size mode to hit a specific file limit.
- Pick a codec — H.264 plays everywhere, VP9 and AV1 compress better but take longer to encode.
About this tool
Video files accumulate quickly. A few minutes of phone footage at default settings can fill a hundred megabytes, and an hour of screen recording can reach several gigabytes. The practical problems are storage space, upload limits, and email attachment restrictions — and the fix is compression, which makes the file smaller by encoding the content more efficiently.
CRF mode (Constant Rate Factor) is the most reliable approach for most people. You set a quality level and the encoder decides how many bits to spend on each frame. Easy-to-compress scenes (static talking head, plain background) get fewer bits; fast action or complex texture gets more. The resulting file has consistent visual quality even though the bitrate varies. Target size mode is the right choice when you have a hard constraint — an email attachment limit of 25 MB, or a platform upload cap — but it will hit the target at whatever quality that allows, which may be poor for a long clip.
AV1 offers the best compression efficiency of the three codecs and is now supported in all current browsers, but it encodes significantly more slowly than H.264. For a short clip where you want the smallest possible file it is worth the wait. For a long clip you need to process quickly, H.264 is the better choice.