Shrink a video until WhatsApp or email will take it
A three minute clip off a phone is 400 MB. WhatsApp stops at 16 MB, Gmail at 25 MB, and most online compressors refuse the upload before you even start because their own cap is 100 MB. Nothing here is uploaded, so the size of your file is not the problem.
- Engine
- ffmpeg compiled to WebAssembly, single threaded
- Presets
- WhatsApp 16 MB, Gmail 25 MB, Discord 10 MB, or your own number
- Upload cap
- None. A 2 GB file is fine, it never leaves the device
- Speed
- Roughly real time to a few times slower, depending on the machine
How to use it
- Drop in the video. MP4, MOV from an iPhone, MKV, AVI and WEBM all work.
- Pick the target: a service preset, or type your own size.
- The tool works out the bitrate that fits your target for that duration, then encodes to H.264.
- Download the result. The original is untouched.
Questions
Why is the first load a few seconds?
The ffmpeg WebAssembly core is around 30 MB and downloads once, then your browser caches it. Every video after that starts immediately.
How slow is encoding in a browser?
Slower than a desktop app, because this is a single threaded build. Budget roughly the length of the video itself on a recent laptop, longer on a phone. You can leave the tab open and it keeps going.
Will the quality be bad?
It is arithmetic, not opinion: fitting ten minutes into 16 MB means a low bitrate and it will look soft. Thirty seconds into 16 MB looks fine. The tool shows the bitrate it picked before you commit, so you can shorten the clip instead if the number looks grim.
Does it keep the audio?
Yes, re-encoded to AAC at 96 kbps, which is intelligible for speech and costs almost nothing against your budget. You can also drop the audio entirely to spend it all on the picture.
Next door
heic to jpg, compress pdf to a size, remove background, passport photo.