About smaller.video

A free online video compressor that runs entirely in your browser. This page says who is behind it, why it exists, and what you are actually agreeing to when you drop a file into it.

Who runs this

Kyllian

I am a software developer, and I build and operate smaller.video on my own. It is a personal project rather than a company: there is no team, no investor and no legal entity behind it. The site, the compressor, the guides on this site and the server configuration are all mine, and any mistake on any of them is also mine.

You can find my other work at github.com/InstantlyMoist, which is also the account that publishes the container image this site is deployed from.

Why it exists

Every free video compressor I could find worked by uploading the video to somebody else's server. That is fine for a holiday clip and completely unacceptable for a client's rough cut, a recorded internal meeting, or anything covered by an NDA — and it is exactly the moment people most need to make a video smaller, because those are the files that hit an attachment limit.

ffmpeg.wasm made the alternative practical: compile FFmpeg to WebAssembly, ship it to the browser, and let the encoding happen on the machine that already has the file. smaller.video is a user interface around that idea, with the settings that actually matter exposed and the rest kept out of the way.

How it is paid for

There is no business model. There are no ads, no affiliate links, no paid tier, no upsell and no data sold to anyone. The running cost is a domain name and a small server that does nothing but hand out static files — because the expensive part, the video encoding, happens on your computer rather than mine. That is why the tool can be free without a catch attached.

The practical consequence is that this is a side project, maintained when I have time. If something is broken it is worth telling me, but there is no support desk and no uptime commitment.

What the privacy claim covers — precisely

The site says your video never leaves your device. That is true, and it is worth being exact about what it does and does not mean, because vague privacy claims are worth nothing.

  • Your video is never transmitted. It is read into browser memory, passed to FFmpeg running as WebAssembly in the same tab, and the output is handed straight back to you. There is no upload endpoint on this site to send it to.
  • There are no accounts and no file storage. Nothing about your file — name, size, duration, contents, settings — is recorded anywhere.
  • The site does use page analytics. It loads a cookieless analytics script from an analytics service I run myself, which counts page views. It sees the URL you visited, the referrer, an approximate country and your browser and device class. It does not set a cookie, does not build a cross-site profile, and has no visibility into anything happening inside the compressor. Saying "no telemetry" while running an analytics script would be a lie, so the site does not say it.

The full statement, including what your browser stores locally, is on the privacy page.

What it is built with

  • FFmpeg — the encoder doing the actual work.
  • ffmpeg.wasm — the WebAssembly build and JavaScript wrapper around it.
  • WebAssembly and SharedArrayBuffer — the platform features that make multi-threaded encoding in a tab possible.
  • Astro for the static site, React for the compressor interface, and Caddy serving the files.

The source repository is Saul-as-a-service/smaller.video on GitHub. It is not public at the moment, so I would rather say that plainly than link you to a 404.

Getting in touch

Bug reports, corrections to the guides and feature requests are all welcome via my GitHub profile. If you spot a factual error in anything written on this site, I would genuinely like to know — the guides are meant to be correct, not just plausible.

Compress a video online, free