Compress a video for Discord
Discord is why most people learn video compression at all. A free account can upload 20 MB per file, so the compressor below is preset to 18 MB, about 10% under it. Everything runs in your browser, so the clip is never sent to a compression service on the way to being sent to your friends.
Drop your video here
or click to browse — MP4, MKV, MOV, WebM, AVI and more
Preset to an 18 MB ceiling for Discord. Change it in the target field if Discord has moved the number since — the tool solves the bitrate from whatever you type.
The Discord upload limit, as of September 2026
A free account can upload 20 MB per file. Nitro Basic raises that to 50 MB and full Nitro to 500 MB. A server at boost level 2 lets every member upload 50 MB in that server, and level 3 allows 100 MB.
The free number has moved a lot. It was 8 MB for years, which is why "compress to 8mb" is still the phrase everyone searches. It went up to 25 MB in 2023, back down to 10 MB in September 2024, and up to 20 MB in August 2026. Discord also says it is experimenting with larger limits for some users, so yours may differ.
The August 2026 change moved one more thing: the mobile app now checks the file size before it compresses anything, the way desktop always has. A phone video that used to squeeze through because the app shrank it first can now be refused outright, so compressing it yourself matters more on a phone than it did.
When you attempt an upload that is too big, Discord names the maximum it will accept from your account in that server, and that figure beats any web page, this one included. Compress to about 10% under it. The 18 MB preset does that for the free limit, and means you are not relying on Discord and your file manager agreeing about what a megabyte is.
| Clip length | Video bitrate budget | Realistic resolution |
|---|---|---|
| 15 seconds | 9,535 kbps | 1080p or original |
| 30 seconds | 4,703 kbps | 1080p |
| 1 minute | 2,287 kbps | 1080p |
| 2 minutes | 1,079 kbps | 720p |
| 5 minutes | 387 kbps | 360p |
| 10 minutes | 177 kbps | 360p |
| 30 minutes | — | Not viable |
Why gameplay clips are the hardest case
Most video compresses well because most video barely changes between frames. Gameplay is the opposite: the camera swings constantly, the entire frame moves at once, particle effects and foliage fill the screen with fine detail, and there is often a HUD with sharp text sitting on top of all of it. Every one of those is expensive to encode.
On top of that, capture software defaults are generous. OBS, ShadowPlay and the Xbox Game Bar all record at high bitrates by design, because a recording you cannot re-take is worth spending disk space on. A minute of 1080p60 capture landing at 200 MB or more is entirely normal.
The consequence is that the usual advice — "just lower the bitrate" — fails sooner here than anywhere else. A one-minute gameplay clip squeezed into 18 MB has roughly 2,287 kbps to work with, which is fine for 720p, borderline for 1080p at 30 fps and visibly poor for 1080p60.
Settings that work for a Discord clip
Start by dropping the resolution to 720p. This is the single decision that matters most, and it is the one people resist. A clip playing in a Discord message on a laptop is a few hundred pixels wide; 1080p is not reaching the viewer's eyes even when it reaches their client. Handing the encoder 44% as many pixels to describe is worth far more than any bitrate tweak.
Then use target-size mode with the ceiling set just under the limit, and let the bitrate be solved from the clip length. If the result still looks poor, the answer is almost always to trim the clip rather than to compress harder — twenty seconds of the part that matters at a good bitrate beats ninety seconds of everything at a bad one.
Leave the output format on MP4. Discord's inline player handles H.264 in MP4 without qualification, which is not true of every combination.
When the clip genuinely will not fit
Below about 150 kbps the encoder cannot hold a picture together at any resolution, and for a long gameplay recording that threshold arrives fast. At that point compressing harder produces a file that is small and unwatchable, which serves nobody.
The real options are to trim, to link, or to pay. Trimming is usually right — almost every clip worth sharing has a fifteen-second version. Linking to a video host and pasting the URL sidesteps the limit entirely and Discord will embed a player for most of them. Nitro raises the ceiling if this is a recurring problem rather than a one-off. The Discord file size limit post goes through its history and every way around it.
Why compressing locally matters here
Gameplay clips and screen recordings are not neutral files. They frequently contain a desktop with open windows in the background, a browser tab bar, notification pop-ups, someone's real name in a voice channel, or a Discord username list down the side of the frame.
A gameplay clip is usually harmless. A clip of your desktop is not: it carries whatever was in the other windows, the tab titles, the notifications that arrived mid-recording. Posting that to a compression site to save four megabytes is a bad trade. Here the video is read into browser memory and encoded by FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly on your own CPU, inside the tab. Nothing is transmitted — there is no upload at all.
Questions about Discord
What is the Discord video upload limit?
As of September 2026, 20 MB per file on a free account, 50 MB with Nitro Basic and 500 MB with Nitro. Boosted servers raise it for everyone inside them: 50 MB at level 2 and 100 MB at level 3. The free limit was 10 MB from September 2024 until August 2026, so older advice will be wrong. Compress to about 10% under your limit; 18 MB is safe on a free account.
How long a video can you send on Discord without Nitro?
Compressed to 18 MB with the audio kept, about 1 minute at 1080p, 2 minutes 30 seconds at 720p and 4 minutes 50 seconds at 480p. Past roughly 11 minutes nothing watchable fits at any resolution. Gameplay needs more bitrate than ordinary footage, so treat those as upper limits.
Can you get around the Discord file size limit without paying?
Yes, three ways. Compress the video to fit, which is what this page does. Trim it to the part that matters, which is the only lossless option. Or upload it to a video host and paste the link, which Discord embeds as a player. A server at boost level 2 or 3 also raises the limit for everyone in it, though someone is paying for those boosts.
How do I compress a video for Discord without losing quality?
You cannot avoid loss entirely if the file has to get smaller, but you can make it invisible: drop to 720p first so the bits are spread over fewer pixels, then set a target size just under the limit. Trimming the clip is the only genuinely lossless way to reduce file size.
Does this upload my clip anywhere?
No. The encoding runs inside your browser tab on your own CPU. That matters more than usual for gameplay clips, which often capture a desktop, browser tabs and usernames along with the game.
Elsewhere on the site
Discord is one of 7 destinations with a page here, and the other 6 differ from the Discord page only in the ceiling the compressor opens at and in what that particular platform does to your file after you send it. The full list is here, or jump straight to one:
Or go straight to a size ceiling: