Compress Video to 8 MB

Where the 8 MB number comes from

Eight megabytes was Discord's free upload limit for years, and it became the de-facto size that clip-sharing communities design around; many tools and Reddit guides are named after it. Discord itself moved to 10 MB in 2023, but 8 MB is still the ceiling on plenty of forums, ticketing systems and messaging apps, and it is a sensible target for anything that has to be sent over a poor connection. This page treats 8 MB as an exact size target: the compressor works out the bitrate that fits the clip's length into 8 MB and encodes once, rather than guessing a quality setting and hoping.

How much video fits in 8 MB depends only on length. At 1080p a clean picture needs around 2.5 Mbps, which is 25 seconds. At 720p about 1.2 Mbps, so 50 seconds. At 480p about 0.6 Mbps, so nearly two minutes. Longer than that means 360p or trimming. The estimate line under the button shows you which resolution the compressor chose, so you can trim first with Trim Video ↗ if the number is lower than you would like.

Hitting a size target accurately

Video encoders cannot promise an exact size: they are given a bitrate and they average around it, spending more on complex scenes and less on simple ones. This compressor aims about 5% under the target so the result lands under the limit rather than on top of it, and the result is typically within 2–3% of the estimate. If you need the file to be as large as possible under the limit — for maximum quality — run it once, look at the result, and nudge the target up slightly if there is headroom. Every run starts from the original file, so repeated attempts do not stack up quality loss.

A few things make an 8 MB target go further. Cap the frame rate at 30 in Advanced for anything that is not fast gameplay; it costs nothing visible and returns a third of the budget to the picture. Remove the audio if it is not needed — 128 kbps of sound over 60 seconds is nearly 1 MB, an eighth of the whole file. And choose H.265/HEVC or AV1 in the codec menu if the recipient's app can play them: they deliver the same quality in roughly two-thirds of the bits, which is the difference between 480p and 720p at this size.

No upload, no limit on the input

Compressing to 8 MB usually means starting from something large — a 2 GB screen recording, a 4K phone clip — and the upload-based tools that promise "video to 8 MB" mostly cannot accept it on a free tier. This one reads the file in place on your disk and streams the output back to disk, so the input size does not matter and the memory use stays flat. The work is done by your device's hardware encoder, which is why a two-minute 4K clip compresses in well under a minute on a recent laptop. Nothing about the video passes through a server.

Frequently asked questions