Compress a video to 100 MB
A hundred megabytes is where most upload limits stop being painful. This page sets the ceiling, shows what it buys, and explains the cases where 100 MB is a genuinely hard wall rather than a preference.
Drop your video here
or click to browse — MP4, MKV, MOV, WebM, AVI and more
The compressor above is already set to a 100 MB ceiling. It solves the bitrate from the length of your clip, encodes on your own CPU, weighs what came out, and runs again at a corrected bitrate if the first pass missed 100 MB. Nothing is uploaded.
How long is a 100 MB video?
As long as the bitrate lets it be. Encoded the way this compressor encodes, H.264 with the audio kept, 100 MB holds roughly:
- 1080p: up to about 6 minutes 10 seconds
- 720p: up to about 14 minutes
- 480p: up to about 27 minutes
- 360p: up to about 62 minutes, past which nothing is watchable at any resolution
Those are ceilings for ordinary camera footage, worked out from the same arithmetic as the table further down. A screen recording or a talking head stretches every one of them; grain, water and fast panning fall short. A video straight off a phone is far bigger per minute than any of this, because phones record at a generous bitrate — Apple's own per-minute figures show how much.
The limits that sit at 100 MB
The strictest one is GitHub: a single file over 100 MB is rejected outright on push, and there is no way around it short of Git LFS or removing the file from history. If you are trying to commit a demo recording to a repository, 100 MB is not a guideline.
Beyond that, 100 MB is a common maximum upload size for learning platforms and student assignment submissions, for many web application file fields, and for a good number of CMS media libraries. It is also a reasonable self-imposed budget for a video you intend to host and serve yourself.
What fits in 100 MB
At this budget the constraint mostly disappears for short and medium clips. A two-minute video gets close to 7,000 kbps — more than 1080p needs on ordinary footage. It is at the ten- and thirty-minute rows that 100 MB starts to bite.
| Clip length | Video bitrate budget | Realistic resolution |
|---|---|---|
| 15 seconds | 53,559 kbps | 1080p or original |
| 30 seconds | 26,715 kbps | 1080p or original |
| 1 minute | 13,293 kbps | 1080p or original |
| 2 minutes | 6,582 kbps | 1080p or original |
| 5 minutes | 2,556 kbps | 1080p |
| 10 minutes | 1,214 kbps | 720p |
| 30 minutes | 351 kbps | 360p |
Work the same arithmetic for any size with the video file size calculator.
For long recordings, resolution beats bitrate
A thirty-minute meeting recording or lecture capture at 100 MB works out to 351 kbps for the picture. That number sounds hopeless, and at 1080p it is. The table above calls it 360p, which is the right call for arbitrary footage. For a talking head or a slide deck 480p is still entirely usable, because those are the easiest possible things for an encoder to compress: the background never moves, so almost every frame can be described as a small difference from the one before it.
The move for long recordings is therefore to be aggressive about resolution and gentle about everything else. Drop to 480p, keep the audio at a decent bitrate because speech intelligibility is what people actually need from a lecture recording, and let the picture be soft. The guide to reducing size without visible loss goes through the content types in more detail.
Compressing in the browser has an advantage at this size
Most free online compressors cap the file you can upload — commonly at 100, 200 or 500 MB — because every byte you send costs them bandwidth and every encode costs them CPU. A 2 GB source that you need to bring down to 100 MB is exactly the case those tools refuse.
Because the encoding here happens on your own machine, the input size is limited only by your device's memory rather than by anybody's free tier. Large files are slower — you are running a video encoder in a browser tab, not on a server farm — but they are not rejected. More on how the no-upload approach works.
Questions about the 100 MB target
How long is a 100 MB video?
Encoded to H.264 with the audio kept, 100 MB holds about 6 minutes 10 seconds at 1080p, 14 minutes at 720p, 27 minutes at 480p and 62 minutes at 360p.
How long can a 1080p video be at 100 MB?
Up to about 6 minutes before the budget drops below what 1080p needs on ordinary footage. Camera footage with a lot of movement wants more, so aim for half that if it has to look genuinely good; a screen recording holds up well past it. Beyond that, drop to 720p. The table on this page shows where each threshold falls.
Why does GitHub reject my 100 MB video?
GitHub blocks any single file over 100 MB on push, and warns above 50 MB. Note that it measures the file itself, so aim comfortably under — 90 MB rather than 99. Git LFS is the supported route for genuinely large assets.
Can this compressor handle a 2 GB source file?
If your device has the memory for it, yes. The entire file is loaded into browser memory, so it depends on your machine rather than on a service limit. Expect it to take a while — a browser tab is slower than a dedicated encoder.
Other size targets
- Compress to 5 MB The tightest ceiling here. Past about three minutes it stops being possible at all.
- Compress to 8 MB The classic chat and forum attachment wall. Tight enough that duration decides everything.
- Compress to 10 MB The default cap on a huge number of upload forms — and 25% more room than 8 MB.
- Compress to 16 MB The WhatsApp video ceiling — and the one target where the platform re-encodes after you.
- Compress to 20 MB The default in helpdesks, CMS media libraries and upload widgets. Rarely announced.
- Compress to 25 MB The Gmail attachment limit — with the base64 overhead that makes 25 MB less than it looks.
- Compress to 50 MB Roomy enough that 1080p survives on short clips. The first target that stops hurting.
- Compress to 200 MB Big enough that the real question is your viewer's patience, not the platform's limit.
- Compress to 500 MB Discord Nitro's per-file ceiling, and the point where the browser becomes the bottleneck.
Compressing for a specific platform instead? Discord, WhatsApp and email each have their own page.
Or start from the file you have. Whether 100 MB is a stretch or a formality depends on what is already inside the container: MP4 , MOV , MKV , WebM , AVI , WMV , FLV , M4V and MTS / M2TS .