Compress Video for WhatsApp
Shrink videos to a WhatsApp-friendly size on your own terms, instead of letting the app crush them.
Free · No signup · Files never leave your device
Drag and drop a video file
or click to browse
Pick a quality preset or an exact target size — like 25 MB for email — after choosing a video.
Compress for other platforms
How it works
Drop your video
It stays on your device — nothing is uploaded.
Compressed to 16 MB locally
The video is re-encoded right in your browser — hardware accelerated when your browser supports it. Adjust the target size or add a downscale first if you like.
Download and share
Get an MP4 that fits WhatsApp — free, no watermark.
Media message or document?
WhatsApp gives you two ways to send a video. As a regular media message it plays inline, but WhatsApp re-encodes it heavily and long videos get refused. As a document it arrives exactly as you sent it — no recompression — but the recipient downloads the full size. The sweet spot for most videos: compress here to around 16 MB, then send as a document. You keep the quality decision, and it stays fast to send on mobile data.
This page presets a 16 MB target; raise or lower it freely. For family videos shot on modern phones, adding the downscale-to-1080p option often halves the size with no visible difference on a phone screen.
Frequently asked questions
Videos sent as media are aggressively re-compressed by WhatsApp, with 16 MB being the classic size guideline (roughly 90 seconds to 3 minutes depending on quality). Files sent as documents can be much larger and skip recompression — compressing to a reasonable size first keeps documents quick to send and download.
WhatsApp's automatic compression is tuned for speed, not quality — it can leave videos blurry and blocky. Compressing locally first lets you pick the size-quality trade-off, and sending the result as a document delivers it to the recipient untouched.
You set a target size and the compressor calculates the video bitrate needed to land just under it, leaving a small margin for the container. If the target is too small for the video length, it warns you before starting instead of producing unwatchable quality.
It depends on how far the video needs to shrink. Halving a file is usually invisible; squeezing a 500 MB video under 10 MB is very noticeable. Two things help a lot: trim the video to just the part you need first, and enable the resolution downscale option — fewer pixels means more bitrate per pixel.
Yes. The video compressor is completely free, with no signup, watermarks, or limits. We make money from our video translation service, not from this tool.
No. The compression happens locally in your browser using WebAssembly. Your file never leaves your device — you can even disconnect from the internet once the page has loaded.