How to Compress a Video for Discord, WhatsApp, and Email

Know your target first

Before touching any setting, find the number you need to beat. The whole job is "get under X megabytes," and X depends entirely on where the video is going. Here are the current 2026 limits for the three most common destinations:

• Discord — Free accounts: 10MB per message (lowered from 25MB in 2024). Nitro Basic: 50MB. Full Nitro: 500MB. Boosted servers can raise the limit for everyone.
• Email — Most providers (Gmail, Outlook) cap attachments around 25MB. Go over and you will be pushed to a cloud link instead.
• WhatsApp — Videos sent as media are compressed and limited to roughly 16MB in practice. Sent as a document, you can share up to 2GB at full quality (the recipient downloads it manually).

Once you know the budget, compression is just hitting it.

The settings that shrink a video

Video size is governed by a few controls. Turn them in this order:

• Resolution. The biggest lever after duration. A 4K clip has nine times the pixels of 720p. For phone viewing — which covers Discord and WhatsApp — 720p is plenty and slashes the file. Drop to 480p for very tight limits.
• Quality (CRF). The constant rate factor sets how aggressively each frame is compressed. Lower CRF means higher quality and bigger files; higher CRF means smaller. Moving from CRF 23 to 28–32 shrinks the file a lot with modest visible change.
• Frame rate. Going from 60fps or 30fps down to 24fps cuts data proportionally and is barely noticeable for most clips.
• Trim the length (with the separate Trim tool). Size scales directly with duration. Cutting dead air off the start and end before you compress is the easiest win of all, and often the difference between fitting and not.
• Audio bitrate. A smaller lever, but dropping audio to 96–128kbps recovers a little headroom on a borderline file.

A simple way to hit a hard limit

There is a quick mental formula. Your size budget, spread over the clip's length, is roughly the total bitrate you can afford: size in megabits ÷ seconds ≈ bitrate. A 60-second clip targeting 10MB (=80 megabits) gives you about 1.3 Mbps for video and audio combined — comfortably 720p territory.

In practice you do not need to do the math. Set 720p and a moderate CRF, compress, and read the resulting size. If it is over, raise the CRF or drop to 480p and try again. Because the tool shows the output size after each pass, two or three tries lands almost any clip under the limit.

Platform-specific tips

• Discord (10MB free) — 720p with a moderate CRF handles most short clips. For longer videos, trim them first with the Trim tool, then drop to 480p if needed. Or send a cloud link.
• Email (~25MB) — You have more room; 720p at good quality usually fits. For longer videos, a cloud link is friendlier to recipients anyway.
• WhatsApp (~16MB media) — Compress to 720p to keep it as in-chat media, or send the original as a document (up to 2GB) when quality matters more than the inline preview.

Compress it privately, in your browser

A browser-based compressor does all of this on your own device — no upload, no account, nothing stored on a server. You drop the clip in, set resolution and quality, and the video is re-encoded locally using your hardware. For personal videos you are about to share, that means the file goes only to the platform you choose, not to a conversion service in between. It also tends to be faster than upload-based tools for large clips, and it keeps working offline once loaded.

Quick checklist

• Find your target: Discord 10MB, email ~25MB, WhatsApp ~16MB as media.
• Drop resolution to 720p (or 480p for tight limits) — the biggest easy win.
• Raise CRF to fine-tune, and trim with the Trim tool to cut length.
• Read the output size and iterate until it fits.
• For oversized clips, send as a WhatsApp document or share a cloud link.