Compress Video to 10MB

Drop your video into the box above. The 10 MB target is already selected, so you can pressCompress Video Now straight away; the plan underneath tells you the resolution and quality it will use before you start. When it finishes, compare the before and after sizes and play the result, then download it. If you change your mind, any other size is one click away.

What fits in 10 MB

Ten megabytes is a small budget for video: about 84 megabits in total, to cover every second of picture and sound. How good the result looks depends almost entirely on how long the clip is, because the same bits are spread over more seconds. This is what the compressor chooses for a typical 1080p phone video:

The sweet spot is under a minute. If your clip is longer and the result looks too soft, the most effective fix is to cut it: trim the part you actually want to share, orsplit it into several 10 MB pieces. Halving the length roughly doubles the quality you can afford.

Why it lands under the limit

Many "compress to 10 MB" tools divide the size by the duration, hand the encoder that bitrate, and hope. Encoders treat a bitrate as a target rather than a promise, so the file often comes back at 10.6 MB and the upload is rejected. This tool sets aside room for the sound and for the file's own structure first, gives the video only what is left, and then weighs the finished file. If it is over, it re-encodes with a corrected budget — up to four passes — and only hands you a file that is under 10 MB. If even the smallest picture cannot fit, it says so rather than giving you an oversized file.

Resolution matters more than you think

At a tight budget, squeezing a full 1080p picture into the bitrate produces blocky smears. The same bitrate at 480p looks clean, especially on a phone, where most shared videos are watched. So the compressor picks the resolution from the bitrate available — the tallest size that will still look clean — rather than keeping the original resolution at any cost. You can pin a resolution yourself in the settings if you prefer.

Sound at 10 MB

Audio is cheap compared with video, and a silent clip is useless for most things people share, so sound is budgeted first: full 128 kbps for short clips, stepping down to 32 kbps for long ones, which keeps speech clear. Only when a clip is so long that sound would leave the picture with almost nothing is it removed.

Other limits

For Discord, the free limit is now 20 MB, so use the Discord Video Compressor, which keeps twice the quality of a 10 MB file; with Nitro Basic it is 50 MB —Compress Video to 50MB. For email, the usual limit is 25 MB:Compress Video to 25MB. For any other size, or to make a video a percentage smaller, use the main Video Compressor.