Compress Video

For an MP4, seconds rather than minutes: 2.1 seconds for a 30-second 720p clip and 38 seconds for an eight-minute 1080p recording on a current laptop. Other formats go through the downloaded engine, which takes about twice the length of the video for 1080p. An older machine is slower either way.

For an MP4 it is not: your browser's own encoder is backed by the chip in your machine and did a 30-second clip in 2.1 seconds here. For the other formats the engine runs on one core of your machine while a server has many. What you get in return is no upload, no size cap, no watermark and no copy of your video on anyone else's disk.

Around 60% smaller on the balanced setting for typical camera footage. Material that is already heavily compressed will shrink less.

You can queue them and they run one after another, not in parallel.

An MP4 is read a few frames at a time; we compressed a 2.2 GB recording here. Other formats have to be held in memory all at once, and no browser can read past about 2 GB in one piece.

Because the compressed version came out the same size or bigger. That happens with footage that is already heavily compressed. Rather than hand you a worse file that is no smaller, the tool keeps your original and marks the row "Already small, original kept". Try the strong setting, which also brings the long edge down to 1280 pixels.

It depends on the route. For an MP4 that your browser's own encoder handles, only the picture is re-encoded and the audio track is copied across as it was. Files that go through the downloaded engine get their sound re-encoded as AAC at 128 kbps. Either way you get an MP4 with H.264 video, named after your file with -small on the end.

The fast route needs your browser to support its built-in video encoder, and it only takes a plain MP4. A file stored with a rotation setting, which phones often use for portrait clips, or a fragmented MP4 goes to the downloaded engine instead, and that runs at roughly two minutes for every minute of 1080p.