Compress video for Discord

Discord limits the size of each file you upload, and the limit depends on your subscription:

We aim a little below the limit on purpose: a file that lands exactly on the limit can still be rejected, and Discord's own help page notes that it's experimenting with upload limits, so some accounts may see a different number. Discord also says Android uploads can hit the limit more often, because phone videos tend to be large. If Discord shows you another limit, type that into the target field instead – and older guides that mention 8 or 10 MB are out of date.

A video's size is roughly its bitrate × length. Knowing the target and the clip's duration, the tool works out how many bits per second the picture can have once the audio is accounted for, and encodes the video as H.264 MP4 at that rate.

Video encoders don't hit a bitrate perfectly, though, especially on very short or very still clips. So if the first pass overshoots by more than 3%, the tool runs a second pass with a proportionally lower bitrate. In practice the result lands just under the target. Before you start you see the estimated size, and afterwards whether the target was met.

A 19 MB target is about 160 megabits. Subtract around 128 kbps of audio and the rest goes to the picture, so the longer the clip, the less detail each second can have:

With Automatic resolution the tool chooses the size that still looks clean at the available bitrate, because a sharp 720p looks better than a smeared 1080p. For game clips with fast motion, one notch lower than the table is often worth it. If the clip is long, cut it down with the video trimmer first: a shorter clip gets more quality per second.

• Trim first: clips from NVIDIA ShadowPlay, AMD ReLive or the Xbox Game Bar often save 30–60 seconds of buffer. Keep only the play that matters and the target gets much easier.
• Reduce to 30 fps: a 60 fps clip spends half its bitrate on extra frames. The 30 fps option frees that up for detail – worth it unless smooth motion is the point.
• Drop the audio if it's just game noise: every bit goes to the picture.
• Start from the original: compressing a clip that was already compressed adds artifacts on top of artifacts.
• Discord previews MP4 (H.264) right in the chat, which is what this tool outputs – no extra conversion needed.

If you share big files every day, Nitro is the simple answer. For the occasional clip, compressing is free and often gives a better-looking result in the chat anyway, because Discord's player streams a smaller file more smoothly on phones and slow connections. The general-purpose video compressor offers the same engine with quality presets, if you want a smaller file rather than a specific size, and compress video for email is set up for the 20–25 MB limits of mail providers.

Compression runs in your browser with its built-in video encoder (WebCodecs) – Chrome, Edge and recent Safari and Firefox. Your clip isn't uploaded to us or anyone else; the finished MP4 is assembled in memory until you download it. No watermark, no account, no daily limit.