Compress a video to 100 MB

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.

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

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 .