Compress a video for Reddit

Posting a video and linking to one are different things

Uploading through the post composer makes Reddit the host. The file goes to Reddit's own video domain, is re-encoded, and is served in Reddit's player: it autoplays in the feed, works in every client, and never sends anyone off the site. Pasting a link to a video hosted elsewhere makes Reddit a bookmark instead. It keeps a URL and a thumbnail and never touches your file at all.

Almost every complaint about "the Reddit video limit" is about the first route and almost every workaround is the second. Which one is open to you is a subreddit question rather than a Reddit question: plenty of communities require native video so the content stays in the feed, and plenty of others block link posts or specific domains. The sidebar rules settle that before any compression setting matters.

The audio is a separate file, and that explains a lot

Reddit serves hosted video as DASH, with the video and the audio as independent streams that the player combines at playback. It is a reasonable way to run a video host and it produces two effects that confuse people constantly.

The first: saving a Reddit video by right-clicking it, or with a tool that grabs the obvious URL, gets you a silent file. The sound was never in that file to begin with. The second: the audio is encoded to its own budget, separately from the picture, so a clip can come back with a perfectly decent image and thin, obviously re-compressed sound.

The practical consequence is to keep anything essential out of the audio alone. Feeds autoplay muted, a good share of viewers never unmute, and whoever saves your clip to send to a friend has a fair chance of sending a silent copy of it.

Why 1080p uploads come back soft

Reddit re-encodes what you upload into its own set of renditions, and those renditions are bitrate-limited because Reddit is paying for the delivery. Uploading 1080p does not make Reddit serve your 1080p. It makes Reddit produce a 1080p of its own at a bitrate chosen against its bandwidth bill, alongside smaller rungs that mobile clients pick freely.

Difficult content comes back worst, and Reddit is full of difficult content. Gameplay, sport, snow, confetti, anything where the whole frame moves at once gives the encoder nothing to reuse between frames, and a bitrate-limited re-encode of that is where the mush comes from. The Discord page goes further into why gameplay in particular is expensive.

So compress the way you would for any platform that re-encodes: gently, toward the top of your budget rather than the bottom. Whatever you hand over is the ceiling on what Reddit can serve and Reddit will lower it from there. A minute-long clip inside the 25 MB preset has a few thousand kilobits per second to play with, which is more than enough. The 25 MB page has the full table.

Length is what people get wrong, not size

Reddit's native upload accepts far more video than the feed will ever reward. The size limits are not what stops a post working; the first three seconds are. A clip scrolling past in a feed is competing against a thumb, and it loses long before it runs out of megabytes.

Cut the setup. Nearly every video posted to Reddit has ten or fifteen seconds at the front that made sense to the person recording it and means nothing to anybody else. Trimming is also the only way to make a file smaller at no quality cost whatsoever, so it is the one edit that pays twice. The compressor has trim handles under the quality slider, so this does not have to be a separate step in a separate application.

Settings for a Reddit post

MP4, H.264, AAC. 720p for anything with real motion in it, since the bits go further across fewer pixels and the feed player is small. Keep 1080p only where the frame carries text or interface detail that has to survive, which is rarer than it feels while you are exporting.

Target 25 MB and raise it if the clip runs long. If the source is an iPhone recording it is probably HEVC in a .mov, and re-encoding it to H.264 in an MP4 here clears up the compatibility problems that travel with it. The MOV page explains what iPhones actually record and why the files are the size they are.

Questions about Reddit

Elsewhere on the site

Reddit is one of 7 destinations with a page here, and the other 6 differ from the Reddit 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:

• Discord
• WhatsApp
• email
• X (Twitter)
• Telegram
• Slack

Or go straight to a size ceiling:

• 5 MB
• 8 MB
• 10 MB
• 16 MB
• 20 MB
• 25 MB
• 50 MB
• 100 MB
• 200 MB
• 500 MB