Compress a video for Telegram
Telegram will accept a file larger than most people will ever make, so this page is not about squeezing under a limit. It is about the person at the other end: what lands on their phone, what it costs them to receive it, and whether it plays at all.
Drop your video here
or click to browse — MP4, MKV, MOV, WebM, AVI and more
Preset to a 25 MB ceiling for Telegram. Change it in the target field if Telegram has moved the number since — the tool solves the bitrate from whatever you type.
The limit is not your problem
Telegram's per-file ceiling is measured in gigabytes rather than megabytes, and the paid tier raises it again. Numbers at that scale only ever get revised upward, so there is no point printing one here for you to rely on in two years; the app refuses a file it will not take, and you have to try quite hard to reach the point where it does.
That removes the arithmetic the rest of this site is mostly about. There is no budget to solve and no ceiling to sneak under. Compressing for Telegram is a courtesy rather than a requirement, which makes it the one platform here where the trade-off is entirely yours to decide on the merits.
| Clip length | Video bitrate budget | Realistic resolution |
|---|---|---|
| 15 seconds | 13,293 kbps | 1080p or original |
| 30 seconds | 6,582 kbps | 1080p or original |
| 1 minute | 3,227 kbps | 1080p |
| 2 minutes | 1,549 kbps | 720p |
| 5 minutes | 575 kbps | 480p |
| 10 minutes | 271 kbps | 360p |
| 30 minutes | — | Not viable |
Compress for the recipient's phone, not for Telegram
What you send lands in somebody's chat, and depending on their auto-download settings it lands on their device without them choosing to receive it. In a group that happens once per member. A 600 MB screen recording sent to forty people is a serious slice of somebody's monthly data spent on something they will watch for six seconds and then have to go and clear out of Telegram's cache.
None of that shows up as an error, which is exactly why it is easy to ignore. The test that works is whether you would want to receive it: on the connection you get on a train, on a phone that has been complaining about storage for a month. Most clips that feel like they have to go out at full quality do not.
For anything past a minute or two, the 25 MB preset above is usually plenty and it arrives on a bad connection without anyone waiting on it. Raise it when the detail genuinely matters and you know the recipient is on wifi.
Sending as video and sending as a file
Telegram has two ways to send the same footage and they behave nothing alike. Sent as a video, it arrives as a player in the chat that starts before the download has finished, and the mobile clients may re-encode it on the way out depending on the quality control you are offered at send time. Sent as a file, the bytes are preserved exactly as you made them, but the recipient downloads the whole thing before seeing a single frame, and on some clients it hands off to an external player or simply sits there.
Playing before the download finishes depends on how the file is laid out. An MP4 carries an index of where everything is, and if that index sits at the end a player has to fetch the entire file before it can start. The MP4s this tool writes are fragmented, so the structure a player needs is at the front and playback can begin straight away.
The rule of thumb: send as video when someone is going to watch it in the chat, send as a file when someone is going to keep it, edit it or archive it. Sending an already-compressed clip as a file is also the reliable way to make sure your compression is the last one applied to it.
MP4 and H.264, unless you know the recipient
Telegram runs on desktop apps, phones, a web client and television clients, all with different decoders underneath. H.264 video with AAC audio in an MP4 container plays inline on every one of them. The alternatives are less dependable: an MKV frequently arrives as a document rather than a video, and HEVC, which is what a recent iPhone records by default, can play as sound over a black picture or refuse outright on older Android hardware.
Compressing to MP4 here re-encodes the picture to H.264, so a file that "will not open" for one person in a group chat usually stops being a problem as a side effect of being made smaller. The MKV page covers what that container is good at and why it travels badly.
Encrypting the chat and then uploading the video
People choose Telegram for a reason, and it is worth noticing when the workflow around it undoes that reason. Running a video through a free web compressor first puts a full-quality copy of it on a server belonging to somebody you know nothing about, under a retention policy you did not read, and only then sends the small version through the app you picked for its privacy.
The compression on this page happens in the tab. FFmpeg is compiled to WebAssembly and runs on your own CPU, and the file is never transmitted; you can disconnect from the network after the page has loaded and compress anyway. How that works, and how to check it yourself.
Questions about Telegram
What is the Telegram file size limit?
Gigabytes rather than megabytes, with the paid tier higher again. It gets revised upward over time, so check it in the app rather than trusting a figure on a page. In practice you are unlikely to hit it, which is why compressing for Telegram is about the recipient's data and storage rather than about the cap.
Why will my video not play for one person in the chat?
Usually the codec or the container. HEVC, which recent iPhones record by default, cannot be decoded on plenty of older Android devices, and an MKV often arrives as a document instead of a player. Re-encoding to H.264 in an MP4 fixes both at once.
Should I send a video as a file or as a video on Telegram?
As a video if it is going to be watched in the chat, since it streams and starts playing before the download finishes. As a file if it is going to be kept, edited or archived, since the bytes arrive exactly as you made them and nothing further is applied on top.
Elsewhere on the site
Telegram is one of 7 destinations with a page here, and the other 6 differ from the Telegram 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: