Compress a video to 8 MB
8 MB is a hard, unforgiving ceiling. This page sets the compressor to an 8 MB target, shows you what actually fits inside it, and tells you when the honest answer is that your clip is too long.
Drop your video here
or click to browse — MP4, MKV, MOV, WebM, AVI and more
The compressor above is already set to a 8 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 8 MB. Nothing is uploaded.
Why 8 MB is still the number everyone searches for
For most of its life, Discord capped free uploads at 8 MB, and an enormous number of people learned video compression purely because of it. Discord has since raised that ceiling, but the phrase outlived the limit — "compress to 8mb" is still how people describe the problem.
The number also survives elsewhere. Plenty of forum software, bug trackers, ticketing systems, self-hosted chat servers and ordinary web upload forms still sit at or near an 8 MB attachment cap, often because that is what the default configuration shipped with and nobody changed it. If a form rejected your file without telling you why, 8 MB is a good first guess at the limit. The history of the Discord limit, and every way around it.
What actually fits in 8 MB
File size is bitrate multiplied by duration, so the only question that matters is how long your clip is. 8 MB is 67.1 million bits. Spread across 15 seconds that is a generous budget; spread across ten minutes it is almost nothing.
The table below is generated from the same arithmetic the compressor uses, with the audio allowance already subtracted. The right-hand column is the resolution that bitrate can carry on ordinary footage — talking heads and screen recordings will do better, and anything with grain, confetti, water or fast panning will do worse.
| Clip length | Video bitrate budget | Realistic resolution |
|---|---|---|
| 15 seconds | 4,166 kbps | 1080p |
| 30 seconds | 2,019 kbps | 1080p |
| 1 minute | 945 kbps | 720p |
| 2 minutes | 440 kbps | 480p |
| 5 minutes | 150 kbps | 360p |
| 10 minutes | — | Not viable |
| 30 minutes | — | Not viable |
Work the same arithmetic for any size with the video file size calculator.
Settings that get you to 8 MB
Pick Target size, leave the ceiling at 8 MB, and the tool solves the bitrate from your clip length before it encodes anything. It then measures the finished file and re-encodes at a corrected bitrate if the first pass came in over.
Two settings are worth changing by hand at this size. First, drop the resolution to whatever the table above suggests — at 8 MB you are almost always better off with a clean 480p than a smeared 1080p, because the same bits spread over a quarter as many pixels look dramatically better. Second, if the clip is over about two minutes, set audio to Strip audio if you can live without it; that hands roughly 64–128 kbps back to the picture, which at this budget is a meaningful share of the total.
When 8 MB is not achievable
There is a point where the honest answer is no. Below roughly 150 kbps the H.264 encoder cannot hold a coherent picture at any resolution — you get blocking, smearing and frames that visibly rebuild themselves after every cut. On the table above, that is where the resolution column stops offering a number.
When you hit that wall you have three real options, in order of how much they cost you: trim the clip so you are only sending the part that matters, drop to 360p and accept that it will look like an old phone video, or use a link instead of an attachment. Compressing harder is not a fourth option — it just produces an 8 MB file that is unwatchable.
If you are compressing an animation, convert it instead
A lot of 8 MB problems are actually GIF problems. GIF stores a palette of at most 256 colours per frame and compresses with an algorithm designed in 1987 for static images, so a five-second 480p GIF routinely lands between 8 and 15 MB. The same five seconds as H.264 in an MP4 is frequently under 1 MB, and it looks better.
If your oversized file is a GIF, drop it in above and set the output format to MP4. The saving is usually an order of magnitude, not a percentage — you will not need to touch the bitrate at all.
Questions about the 8 MB target
Is 8 MB still the Discord upload limit?
No. Discord raised the free upload ceiling above 8 MB, and paid Nitro tiers go considerably higher. 8 MB remains the number people search for because it was the limit for years, and because plenty of other forums and upload forms still enforce something close to it. Check the exact limit where you are uploading before you compress.
How long can a video be and still fit in 8 MB?
About a minute and a half at 480p: the solver gives that clip roughly 620 kbps of video. At 360p you can stretch to about three minutes, where the budget falls to 293 kbps. Beyond that you are trimming the clip rather than compressing it.
Does the file get uploaded to compress it?
No. FFmpeg is compiled to WebAssembly and runs inside this page, so the video is read from your disk into browser memory and encoded on your own CPU. No copy of it is sent anywhere.
Other size targets
- Compress to 5 MB The tightest ceiling here. Past about three minutes it stops being possible at all.
- 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 100 MB Generous enough for real 1080p. Also GitHub's hard per-file push limit.
- 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 8 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 .