How to compress a video
- Drop an MP4, MOV or WebM on the box above — up to 2 GB.
- The tool reads the video and fills in sensible settings: long edge capped at 1920 px if the video is bigger, 30 fps if it was recorded faster, Medium quality, audio kept.
- Click Compress video. The new size appears next to the original, with both videos playable so you can check text and motion.
- Need it smaller? Choose 1280 and Low and compress again. Then Download MP4.
Why screen recordings are so large
A recording made with the macOS screenshot toolbar or QuickTime Player captures your display at its native Retina resolution — our test files were 2284 to 2932 pixels wide — usually at 60 frames per second, and at a generous bitrate meant for editing. That is ideal as a master copy and wasteful for sharing: a 148-second recording of ordinary app use was 73 MB.
Each of the three settings here attacks one of those causes. Max size brings the resolution down to what people actually view — 1920 px on the long edge is a full-HD frame, the size most video players and laptops show. Frame rate drops 60 fps to 30, which halves the frames with little visible difference for clicks, typing and menus. Quality sets how many bits the encoder may spend per second; screen content is mostly still, so it compresses extremely well.
Measured on real recordings
Three macOS screen recordings and one iPhone video, compressed in Chrome with the default settings and two smaller presets:
| Video | Original | Default | 1280 · Medium · 30 fps | 1280 · Low · 24 fps |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Screen recording, 148 s, 60 fps | 73.2 MB | 3.98 MB (−95%) | 2.63 MB (−96%) | 1.53 MB (−98%) |
| Screen recording, 12 s | 5.8 MB | 0.77 MB (−87%) | 0.44 MB (−92%) | 0.29 MB (−95%) |
| Screen recording, 3.5 s, 60 fps | 15.4 MB | 0.90 MB (−94%) | 0.56 MB (−96%) | 0.22 MB (−99%) |
| iPhone video, HEVC, with audio | 13.6 MB | 10.35 MB (−24%) | 5.83 MB (−57%) | 2.38 MB (−83%) |
Quality held up: comparing five seconds of the 148-second recording against the original at the same size gave an SSIM of 0.99, where 1.0 means identical. The iPhone video shrank least because it was already compressed with HEVC; at original size and High quality it even grew by 71%, which the tool flags so you can pick lower settings.
Browsers make a difference
The compression runs on your browser’s own video encoder, and they are not equal. In our tests Chrome produced much smaller files than WebKit, the engine behind Safari — 3.98 MB versus 17.4 MB for the 148-second recording — and finished in 33 seconds rather than almost two minutes. If you have both, use Chrome for big files.
Audio follows the same rule. Chrome kept the iPhone clip’s sound as AAC. A browser that can’t encode AAC still gets a compressed video, with the audio dropped and a note saying so. Codec support for the input depends on the browser too: H.264 opens everywhere and HEVC opened in both engines on our Mac, while Apple ProRes from editing apps doesn’t open in any browser — export an H.264 copy first.
Choosing settings for where it’s going
- Slack, email, a support ticket: 1280 · Medium · 30 fps. Our 148-second recording became 2.6 MB — check small text in the preview before sending.
- A product page or docs: the default — 1920 on the long edge, Medium, 30 fps — keeps small text crisp on large screens.
- A GitHub issue: GitHub accepts MP4, MOV and WebM uploads (10 MB on free plans, per GitHub’s docs), so the default or the 1280 preset usually fits.
- A short loop in a README or chat: make a GIF instead with Video to GIF.
