Compress a video to send by email
Email is the one place where the right answer is often not to attach the video at all. This page covers the limits, the arithmetic and — just as usefully — how to tell when a link is the better call.
Drop your video here
or click to browse — MP4, MKV, MOV, WebM, AVI and more
Preset to a 20 MB ceiling for email. Change it in the target field if email has moved the number since — the tool solves the bitrate from whatever you type.
The limits you are actually up against
Gmail allows attachments up to 25 MB and offers a Google Drive link above that. Outlook.com sits lower, around 20 MB. Corporate Exchange and Microsoft 365 servers are configured per organisation and are frequently tighter than either, sometimes as low as 10 MB, and the person you are sending to has no idea what theirs is set to.
There is also an overhead almost nobody accounts for: attachments are base64-encoded in transit, which inflates them by about a third. Your 24 MB video is roughly 32 MB of message on the wire, and while Gmail measures its own limit sensibly, many receiving servers apply their cap to the encoded size. That is how an attachment leaves your outbox successfully and bounces on arrival.
The practical rule: 18 to 20 MB unless you know exactly what the recipient runs. The compressor above is preset to 20 MB. The 25 MB page has the full bitrate table.
| Clip length | Video bitrate budget | Realistic resolution |
|---|---|---|
| 15 seconds | 10,609 kbps | 1080p or original |
| 30 seconds | 5,240 kbps | 1080p or original |
| 1 minute | 2,556 kbps | 1080p |
| 2 minutes | 1,214 kbps | 720p |
| 5 minutes | 440 kbps | 480p |
| 10 minutes | 204 kbps | 360p |
| 30 minutes | — | Not viable |
Most emailed video is a screen recording, which changes everything
The bitrate tables on this site are conservative because they have to work for arbitrary footage. What people actually email is not arbitrary: it is a screen recording, a slide deck with a voice-over, a demo, or somebody talking to a webcam. All four are the easiest possible content for a video encoder, because the majority of every frame is identical to the frame before it.
A static screen recording holds up at 1080p on around 800 kbps — well below what the general tables would recommend for that resolution — and keeping 1080p matters, because the entire point of a screen recording is usually that text is readable. So for this specific case, resist downscaling first and lower the bitrate instead. That is the opposite of the advice on almost every other page here, and it is correct for this content.
When to send a link instead
Attaching video to email is a bad idea more often than people admit, and not only because of size limits.
- A large attachment lands in the recipient's mail store and counts against their quota, on their device and on their server, permanently.
- Forwarded three times, it exists in a dozen mailboxes. Video that is genuinely useful gets forwarded.
- Some corporate mail gateways strip or quarantine video attachments outright as a policy matter, and the sender is not always told.
- A recipient on a phone downloads the whole thing before they can see any of it.
The case for compressing anyway
None of that means never attach. A short clip that the recipient needs immediately, without a login, without a Drive permissions dialogue and without a link that expires, is a genuinely good use of an attachment — and for anything confidential it can be the better option, because a link is a URL that can be forwarded to people you did not choose.
The heuristic that works: under about two minutes and it comfortably fits, attach it. Over five minutes, or it only fits by being made ugly, send a link. In between, ask what the recipient is going to do with it.
Confidential footage should not go through a compression service
The video people most need to email is frequently the video they least ought to upload: client work, an internal demo, a recording made under an NDA, something with a customer's data on screen. Running it through a free web compressor means placing a copy of it on an unknown server, under an unknown retention policy, in an unknown jurisdiction.
The compression on this page happens inside your browser tab. FFmpeg is compiled to WebAssembly and executed on your own CPU, and the file is never transmitted — you can confirm that in your browser's network panel, or by disconnecting from the internet after the page loads and compressing anyway. More on how that works, and how to verify it.
Questions about email
What is the maximum video size I can email?
Gmail sends up to 25 MB, Outlook.com around 20 MB, and corporate mail servers vary widely and are often stricter. Because attachments are base64-encoded in transit and grow by roughly a third, 18 to 20 MB is the size that reliably gets through to an unknown recipient.
How do I email a video that is too big?
Compress it if it is short — a two-minute screen recording fits inside 20 MB comfortably. If it is long, upload it somewhere and send a link. Gmail does this automatically above 25 MB by switching to a Google Drive link.
Is it safe to compress a confidential video here?
The file never leaves your device: FFmpeg runs as WebAssembly inside the page and encodes on your own CPU. You can verify it by watching the network panel during a compression, or by going offline after the page has loaded and compressing anyway.
Elsewhere on the site
email is one of 7 destinations with a page here, and the other 6 differ from the email 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: