How to compress a video without losing quality (much)

🧱 What “quality” is made of (four words, that’s all) #

Four things decide how a video looks, and only one of them is the file size.

• Bitrate is how many bits each second of video gets. More bits, more detail. Almost everything below is about this one.
• Resolution is how many pixels wide and tall the picture is. 1080p is bigger than 720p.
• Frame rate is how many pictures per second. 60 feels smoother than 30.
• The codec is the method doing the squeezing. 8mb.video uses H.264, which plays everywhere.

Four words. That’s the whole vocabulary. You now know more about video than I did when I started this site.

🧮 The one rule: size ÷ length = bitrate #

Multiply the size you pick out to bits, divide by the seconds, and that’s what every second of video gets to spend. 8mb.video aims for about 93% of the size you pick, so the finished file lands under your limit, and sound takes its share first (about 18%, never more than 192 kbps).

Example 1: 30 seconds at 10MB is about 2.6 Mbps for everything, and about 2.4 Mbps for the picture once the sound has its share. That looks good.

Example 2: 3 minutes at 10MB is about 433 kbps for everything, and about 350 kbps for the picture. Same size, six times the length, a lot less picture to go round.

Same file size, wildly different results. Length is the sneaky one.

Try your own numbers in the video size calculator.

🎚️ The four levers, in order of effect #

🖥️ What 720p means here, and why it’s fine #

When the picture gets less than 4 Mbps, which is nearly always, the copy you get back is 720p, 1280 pixels wide. Above that, it’s capped at 1920 wide. On a phone, or in a chat embed, 720p is about the size the video is shown at anyway, so you’re not losing what you would see.

The 1080p case: it needs about 4 Mbps of picture, so a 10MB file only gets there for clips of about 18 seconds or less. Past that, the extra bits are better spent keeping 720p clean.

🎞️ Frame rate #

Clips at 48 frames per second or more are halved, so a 60fps clip comes back at 30fps, and anything at 120fps or above comes back at 30fps. Fewer frames means each one gets more bits, which is part of how a small file stays sharp.

Yes, your 60fps gameplay becomes 30fps. I know. I promise your friends will be looking at the headshot, not counting frames.

🙅 “Lossless” compression isn’t a thing for video #

Any tool that makes a video much smaller is re-encoding it, and re-encoding throws detail away. “Visually lossless” just means the bitrate is high enough for your content that you can’t see what went missing.

That’s the goal here too: choose a size big enough for the length, and most people won’t notice. If a tool says it compressed your video with zero quality loss, it’s either fibbing or it didn’t compress it.

📉 If you want it to look worse on purpose #

Some people come here wanting the video to look worse on purpose, which is honestly refreshing. Pick a smaller size. That’s it. That’s the whole trick. Here’s what 8MB gives a one-minute clip, so you can see what you’re choosing: 8MB at 60 seconds.

🔍 What to expect, by kind of video #

A rough guide, not a promise. The words come from how the picture holds up at each bitrate for each kind of content.

Swipe sideways for more bitrates →

Kbps here is the picture’s share, as in the calculator. The output is an MP4 with H.264 and AAC, as on the formats page. Sending game clips? There’s a page for that. The Discord how-to has the steps.